Overview
In 2006, webinars represented one of the fastest growing areas for business-to-business publications. As Director of Business Planning & Online Commerce, Automotive News Group, Crain Communications, John Fitzgerald wanted to offer a sponsored webinar solution to his existing online advertising clients.
According to Fitzgerald, there was little knowledge of how many webinars and webcasts his group would be able to deliver and how receptive customers would be to the initiative. "Our primary objective was to provide our clients with a successful webinar that would drive leads for them and lead to repeat webinars, or webinars scheduled in a series," stated Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald selected ON24 as the group's webcasting provider as ON24 had successfully managed webinar programs for other Crain Communications' publications like Business Insurance and BtoB Magazine. "ON24 has been excellent in helping us to not only provide a reliable, consistent webinar product for our clients, but has also helped us to provide some 'out of the box' solutions -- such as the webinar we did that required translation into Chinese so it would be available on-demand in both North America and China," elaborated Fitzgerald.
Since starting their webinar program, the group has steadily increased the audience over time. The most recent webinar had more than 1,400 registrants and more than 700 unique viewers, more than 400% higher than the group's earliest webinar efforts.
"We've experienced rapid increases in our webinar volume, and we will experiment with new online event models, including webcasts and editorially-driven webinars. We've increased our webinar revenue by more than 200% from 2006 to 2007 and ON24 was integral in making this a successful initiative," said Fitzgerald.
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