Looking for a webinar platform? Look no further. Your search starts and stops with ON24.
Updated October 29, 2021

Looking for a webinar platform? Look no further. Your search starts and stops with ON24.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with ON24

ON24 is being used by our marketing department to reach our reseller partner audience for informational and technical training sessions. We were doing this prior to the pandemic, but it become even more important to virtually connect with partners when it hit so we nearly doubled our events to compensate for lost touchpoints at physical events. We run 2 main types of events through ON24 - discussion panels for partners focused on overall sales opportunities and technical trainings for partners focused on the technical implementation of certain hardware/software technologies. It's essential for our partners to under the why and how behind everything we sell and we accomplish both of those goals through ON24 webinar events.

Pros

  • Attendee Engagement - you can define an engaging experience for attendees that will keep everyone paying attention
  • Engagement Tracking - more importantly, you can track that engagement and gain actionable insights for sales and marketing follow-up
  • Ease of Use - the platform is very intuitive and easy to learn so anyone from a beginner to a seasoned webinar veteran can get a ton out of the platform.
  • Integration with CRM - data isn't actionable unless it's in front of the people that will use it. Our integration was fairly simple to setup and has been extremely beneficial to sales for their strategic follow up.

Cons

  • Connecting/Streaming to Facebook - you can't schedule the stream on Facebook of provide any additional details. You just start the stream and it automatically creates a live event with no context. Would be a nice improvement to have more control over this.
  • Increased customer engagement
  • Increased MQLs and SQLs
  • Quicker handoff of leads from marketing to sales
  • Better data integration to CRM and marketing automation systems
  • Integrate with CRM/marketing automation software
  • Conduct lead scoring
  • Track registration and attendance
  • Enable sales follow-up
  • Optimize campaign nurture programs
With our ON24 Elite contract we were able to quickly scale and double our virtual engagements with partners. In fact, our initial use case once things shut down was transitioning our first conference of 2020 to a virtual experience in about 3 weeks. Because ON24 is an easy platform to use, it wasn't a problem translating our large conference to a virtual experience using the ON24 platform.
It's certainly easy to scale the number of online experience initiatives, but it's more difficult and costly to scale with expanded platform use across departments. The cost per user login seemed a bit high for us so we have two total logins for our creative team to manage all webinars through the platform.
We used a number of other webinar platforms in the past through Intercall, Unisfair, West UC, and Intrado (all the same company, just went through a lot of name changes or acquisitions I think). ON24 is by far the most customizable and easiest to use, brand, and integrate. The other platforms were "enterprise" but functioned in a CMS or platform that did not look, feel, or operate as "modern" while we used them which made it difficult and ultimately lead to use switching to ON24. Our previous contracts were done by a "per event basis" which meant higher costs for more webinars. With our unlimited contract, we're saving thousands of dollars now that our webinar program has expanded significantly due to COVID.

Do you think ON24 delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with ON24's feature set?

Yes

Did ON24 live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of ON24 go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy ON24 again?

Yes

ON24 is best suited for larger webinars where you need to develop engaging experiences - well beyond "death by powerpoint". It's also great to smaller engagements with a targeted audience (ABM strategies) where you're looking to get personal. If you have recurring webinars, even better, because it's simple to copy an event versus creating from scratch every time. It's least appropriate for when you need to get direct feedback to attendees or when it should be two-way conversation. Although ON24 did just release breakout rooms where this is possible, it's an extra cost that not everyone will want to incur when you can just revert back to Zoom or Teams.

ON24 Feature Ratings

Virtual Event ()
Not Rated
10.0
Audience polling
10
Q&A
10
10.0
Branding options
10
Integration to Marketing Automation
10
9.0
Participant roles & permissions
8
Confidential attendee list
10
10.0
Calendar integration
10
Record meetings / events
10
Slideshows
10
Event registration
10
Mobile Capabilities ()
Not Rated

ON24 and Communications During a Pandemic

It's fully customizable from start to finish and easy to spin up a new webinar whenever you need it. In fact, when the pandemic hit, we used ON24 to transition a full onsite conference to a virtual experience within 3 weeks of the lockdown. ON24 was so easy for us to use when doing this. It helped us to turn a potential revenue-losing disaster into an amazing opportunity to make our vendors and customers both happy with an event that could've been completely cancelled.
  • Customer training
  • Internal communications
  • Lead generation
  • Product Marketing

Using ON24

2 - We only have two true "users" of the platform because we only have 2 logins. Both users are multimedia coordinators who work closely to produce these events with our digital and marcom coordinators dedicated to our virtual events and webinars. This roles work closely with our marketing managers and program managers, along with others from our sales and purchasing organizations, to develop strategy, messaging, target audiences, and more to ensure we have a collaborative and aligned effort to make the most out of every webinar.
4 - I'll count our two multimedia coordinators in this, along with our business analyst and CRM developer who work closely with us to ensure that our integration into our Microsoft Dynamics CRM is functioning correctly and data is flowing and connecting properly through ON24 Connect. We could list others but at a very basic level, 4 users.
  • Live webinars for customers
  • On-demand webinars for customers
  • Lead generation for sales
  • Transitioning an on-site event to fully virtual using webinars only (no virtual environment needed)
  • Internal and vendor-facing corporate events
  • N/A - we will need to upgrade to ON24 Target and ON24 Engagement Hubs to squeeze more out of our ON24 usage
ON24 is everything we expected and everything we needed. It's simple to use, extremely customizable, and scales very easily. The integration to our CRM makes ON24 major lead generator for our sales team from our established webinars series. We can automate lead delivery to our sales team as well. If anything, we will look to expand our partnership in the future.

Evaluating ON24 and Competitors

Yes - We formerly used a company called Unisfair which has since been acquired and re-branded by other companies. The contract with this company only allowed for a certain number of events, unlike ON24 Elite which offers unlimited webinars. There was also very limited customization options. In addition, we really wanted a solution that our allowed our team to fully manage the event from start to finish whereas our previous webinar provided required that we use an event producer.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
In one word - Customization. We loved the fact that ON24 allows for customization of the entire webinar experience for our attendees. We can brand them however we want, modify registration pages, incorporate branding and imagery that is unique to our brand or unique to an opportunity, and so much more. The customized webinar experience added a new engagement element that we were previously lacking in webinars. ON24 makes it easy.
I wouldn't change a thing. We researched a number of companies and while other companies had solid solutions, they seemed very "business" or B2B and lacked the consumer or viewer friendly features we wanted. The reality is that B2B still requires you to sell to a human, so having a human experience was important to us. ON24 offered exactly that.

Upgrading ON24

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