How ServiceNow Transforms Thought Leadership Content Into Engaging Digital Experiences

In a digital-first world, it takes an engaging digital marketing strategy to attract and nurture leads at every stage in the buying journey. With the ON24 platform, ServiceNow has embraced digital transformation with the savvy of a company that puts audience engagement at the center of their marketing, and their results speak for themselves.

Hear from ServiceNow’s Sr. Campaign Marketing Manager, Rosaline Raj, on how she and her team create and deliver digital experiences that establish thought leadership, drive engagement, and generate actionable insights that help them turn leads into customers.

Q: What were you looking for in a Platform? What made the ON24 platform stand out to you?

One of my favorite features of the ON24 platform is the Engagement Hub. We’re able to deliver an always-on, content experience where the audience can engage with multimedia thought-leadership content, hear customer stories and learn more about ServiceNow.

By enabling multi-registration our audience can interact with several assets without having to fill out multiple forms, which can deter them from moving forward in their content journeys.

That kind of engagement helps us, as marketers, monitor the success and extend the life of our content. It also makes following up a lot easier. Knowing which content our audience engaged with helps us personalize our message to their unique interests and pain points.

Q: What role do webinars and events play in your overall marketing strategy and how did you pivot your event and content marketing strategy to survive and thrive in a digital-first world?

In addition to being our #1 pipeline driving channel, webinars have played a pivotal role in creating value for our audience. I think listening to and understanding the audience is key.

If the content is not engaging or adding value, they’ll go somewhere else. And the audience is paying attention to more than just the webinar content.

They have high expectations for the entire process, from signup to follow-up. The webinar program needs to be carefully orchestrated to make an impression and deliver value.

I’m very fortunate to work with an amazing team and they are at the heart of why we’ve been able to deliver a successful program with outstanding content, great attendance and high audience engagement.

When the pandemic hit, like many companies, we pivoted to a higher frequency of events but saw a decline in registrations. There was just too much noise and a struggle for people’s attention while they were trying to adjust to the new reality.

We quickly realized that less is more and went back to delivering monthly webinars on top-of-mind topics from industry leaders. We saw numbers improve immediately.

We also had great success virtualizing some of our live events – we delivered new content and reached a wider audience while saving on travel and venue costs.

Q: Describe your content ideation process. How do you choose relevant topics, audiences and cadences for upcoming webinars?

I am blessed to work with a talented team that has deep industry experience. Our solution sales and product teams bring incredible customer and industry insight.

We meet regularly to brainstorm potential webinar topics, presenters, customer stories, use cases and how we can best share the story to add value.

The ideation process is a great way to bring cross-functional teams together and is always a phenomenal learning experience for me.

Q: As companies settle into this “new normal” more and more webinar invitations seem to be finding their way into our inboxes. What are some ways you make your campaigns and webinars stand out and cut through all the digital noise?

We want the audience to walk away from each webinar with something to think about – whether it’s a new trend, industry insights or practical takeaways they can implement immediately.

To achieve this, we ensure that our content (invitations and messaging) takes a people-first approach that highlights what the attendee would learn and prepares them to get the most out of their experience.

We’ve seen great success with customer stories and often bring in thought leaders and analysts to entice our audience and deliver the richest experience possible.

Q: How do you measure the success of your webinars?  What impact have they had on ServiceNow’s business?

Leads! That said, it’s not just the quantity, it’s the quality. We look at digital event and webinar registrations, attendance, MQLs and SALs. But we also monitor engagement scores, which we track in our ON24 Engagement Hub.

For example, are they interacting with content we have in the resource hubs? What kinds of questions are they asking? How many people are viewing the on-demand vs. live webinars?

Based on our findings, we adjust the strategy to increase engagement for future webinars.

Webinars and digital events have had a huge impact on our pipeline, and we work closely with our sales team to segment appropriately and manage follow-up communications.

Q: What role does the content hub or ON24 Engagement Hub play in helping drive the success of your thought leadership program? How does the Engagement Hub help with your web traffic and lead sourcing?

A webinar may be a prospect’s first experience with our brand. So having the right platform and technology, along with impactful content is crucial to delivering a best-in-class experience.

As for web traffic, we drive audiences to both an embedded content library powered by ON24 Engagement Hub, and to personalized landing pages. It’s really great to have the content hub as a one-stop-shop for audiences both internal and external.

Having all of the traffic go to one dedicated thought-leadership page also gives us greater visibility into the resources that resonate best with our audiences, so we can continue to collect those actionable engagement insights that drive our personalization programs.

By keeping the content available on the Engagement Hub and Target pages, we’re also able to extend the life of our content and webinars. At some point, we will start to filter the content by topic type to make the experience more seamless for our visitors.

That’s the great thing about ON24: there is so much flexibility with the platform, it’s been easy for us to make updates as we refine our programs.

Q: What strategies do you use to design interactive experiences, to drive engagement for your customers?

It really depends on the webinar. For some, we do live demos with easy‐to‐use screenshare on the platform. It’s really quite seamless and enables us to provide the audience with instant insight into our capabilities.

We’ve also done pre-event surveys to better gauge audience interest and cater webinar content. We also run polls throughout the webinar, and that gives us insight to where the audience is and where to go next.

It’s also important to use different presentation formats and see what works best for the audience — we’ve mixed it up and done everything from keynotes and panel discussions to fireside chats.

For longer events and summits we bring in a graphic artist to create a visual representation of the webinar which we send out to our attendees in the post email. We also have phenomenal moderators who keep the conversation going smoothly.

They are industry experts and enrich the conversation with their insight and questions. We also like to have experts readily available to give in-depth answers to questions in real-time.

Q: How are you looking to leverage your content outside of webinars? Content hubs? Landing pages?

Aside from our multi-media content hub, we promote our content through different marketing channels including emails.

Q: How do you work cross-departmentally and leverage partnerships to execute the successful webinar programs ServiceNow is so famous for?

I didn’t realize we were famous for that! It’s really a testament to how we work internally as a team.

We have in-house content, webinar, product, sales and marketing teams who all work seamlessly together to create these content-rich experiences. We’re highly-collaborative, proactive and work great together — like a well-oiled machine.

One of the things that makes webinars so great is that they are live, interactive and human. And sometimes things can go wrong (it’s all part of the fun).

That’s why agility and collaboration are so important. Everything is always evolving and no webinar is ever the same.

The ON24 team has been very supportive in helping us get everything done on time, look great and perform well.

The platform itself is wonderful, but what makes our digital experience programs so successful, in addition to our internal teamwork, is our relationship with the ON24 team — they are always ready to help us create an engaging experience for the audience.