Highlights From ON24X: How Successful Brands Use Digital Engagement to Drive Thought Leadership

According to the 2022 LinkedIn-Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, establishing your brand as an industry thought leader has become one of the most effective ways to demonstrate your value to customers who are up against leaner budgets and tighter procurement processes. Yet, nearly just as many B2B marketers do not feel that they were successful in developing thought leadership content. 

So how can you strengthen your thought leadership strategy to more effectively break through with prospects and customers, and continue driving growth for your business? 

To answer that question, we welcomed three amazing brands – UCB, GSK and United Healthcare – to speak during “The ON24 Experience 2023” Thought Leadership breakout track and share how they reimagined digital engagement to not only establish thought leadership but measure its impact on the bottom line. 

Read on for their tips, tricks and best practices. 

Optimizing for maximum audience engagement

“The best way to activate your audiences is to make every experience as interactive as possible,” says Dr. Angelia Drake, RN, MSN, DNP – Director of Community Engagement and Strategy at GSK during her ON24X 2023 breakout session. 

Drake and her team at GSK run patient education programs, including an annual Lupus awareness series, that helps patients and caregivers access the information they need to manage their symptoms. 

During her ON24X breakout session, she highlighted the importance of allowing audiences to engage directly with the experience. “This raises patient sentiment and encourages them to rely on us for answers to their questions and help navigate their treatment journeys.”

According to Drake, it also unlocks insights into attendees’ unique needs and preferences so they can more effectively customize and refine upcoming webinars, events and follow-ups to resonate more deeply. Drake and her team at GSK do this by including an array of engagement opportunities into every webinar and digital experience, including live chat, Q&A, polls, pre-and-post event surveys, links to value-add content and even QR codes to connect directly with HCPs. 

Using first-party data to personalize for every audience  

According to Mara Lopez, Virtual Marketing Coordinator at United Healthcare, the key to establishing trust is understanding your audiences and planning around their unique needs and preferences. Lopez and her team use ON24 to deliver health and wellness webinars designed to teach patients about key health topics and help them lead healthier lives. 

During her ON24X session, Lopez revealed her secret to truly understanding her audience and delivering on their needs: first-party engagement data.

Like the team at GSK, Lopez and the United Healthcare team are very strategic about the engagement opportunities she builds into each webinar. “When we send our patient liaisons out into the community, they come back with a better understanding of our patient base and how we can more effectively engage them,” she says. “With interactive digital experiences, we can recreate that type of engagement and generate the insights we need to find our best leads and personalize our follow-up.” 

To get the most out of this engagement data, Lopez and the team at United Healthcare integrate ON24 directly into their CRM and marketing automation workflow. This saves the field team hours of manual data extraction and triggers timely follow-up. United Healthcare generated over 3,000 leads and 2,000 hours of engagement from one webinar. This integration makes it possible to turn all that data into action and build experiences around the needs of each audience. 

Standardizing programs to scale

To build trust with HCPs and ultimately influence prescribing behavior, the team at UCB has adopted a multi-channel engagement strategy. During her ON24X session, Adela Shulz, IEU Rheumatology Strategy and Operations Omnichannel Lead at UCB, explained that the first step in making this transition was adopting the right tools to execute and scale. 

“We went from a scattered landscape of using multiple technologies to one unified platform, ON24,” says Shulz. UCB scales its engagement program by creating standardized webinar templates, promo emails and follow-up materials. This makes it easy for the team to take what has already been built – standardized templates that showcase the UCB brand – and customize them to each audience segment. 

Shulz provides platform training and speaker tutorials to get new team members onboarded quickly. This keeps the execution process flowing smoothly. And, by integrating ON24 with their CRM and marketing automation tools, the team can automate data flow and customized follow-up. 

By optimizing their programs for audience engagement, using first-party data to personalize to every audience and standardizing their programs to scale, these three companies were able to establish credibility, prove the value of their products and services, and help their audiences succeed. 

To watch these sessions on demand, visit the ON24X 2023 on-demand hub.