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KnowBe4 secures and scales sales with ON24 | Customer Story | ON24

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KnowBe4 drives demand and generates pipeline with ON24

  • 100k+

    leads generated in 1 year

  • 27%

    increase in webinars run with ON24 — some with 2,000+ registrants

  • $300K+

    in pipeline from a single webinar

Introduction

The team at KnowBe4 turned to ON24 to scale its webinars, educate and engage busy IT pros — all while driving impressive pipeline for the business.

Problem

KnowBe4 is the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform. To stay at the cutting-edge of cybersecurity and social engineering threats, KnowBe4 has an expert team of staff, which includes globally-renowned evangelists and influencers.

In the late 2010s, KnowBe4 decided to harness its top talent to produce webinars, which included the late Kevin Mitnick — a world-famous figure within the hacking community. Originally held once a quarter, these webinars quickly became extremely popular — gaining upwards of 2,000 registrants.

However, the speed of this success caused a problem. KnowBe4’s existing platform was simply not capable of reliably hosting such large webinars and was lacking in key functionality such as strong data and analysis capabilities and strong integrations.

To scale their success further, the team at KnowB4 needed a different solution — one that offered a feature-rich and robust platform that solved these issues, as well as the support needed to meet the team’s goals. 

Solution

KnowBe4 had a number of important requirements in a webinar solution. Security controls needed to be in line with the expectations of IT and cybersecurity professionals. The platform needed to make it easy to host content and offer high-quality attendee experiences. With its educational focus, KnowBe4 wanted to provide proof to attendees of continuing professional education (CPE). To improve engagement and drive commercial impact, it needed to provide detailed analytics and integrate with KnowBe4’s marketing tools and technology – Hubspot and Salesforce. And to achieve their  ambitions, any vendor had to offer expert support and guidance.

Thankfully ON24 was more than capable to keep up with their stringent requirements. With unlimited attendee capacity and 99.999% uptime, ON24 could power any KnowBe4 event — no matter how many registrants there were. With ISO27001 and ISO27701 certifications, SOC 2 Type II audits and other essential security features, ON24 gave the team confidence that they could host sensitive webinars. Any event experience could be easily customized and feature further content and offers, while each interaction was made accessible via analytics and integrations. ON24 also provided easy ways for KnowBe4 to meet its CPE certification needs in an automated fashion that gave time back.

With ON24 KnowBe4 was able to migrate all of the company’s existing webinar content, registrations and data into the ON24 platform. This meant that KnowBe4 maintained its existing library and user data, but could now take full advantage of the additional data features within ON24. The native integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce made it easy for the team not only to pass user data into their marketing automation and CRM systems, but to provide the foundation for engagement-driven lead scoring. 

KnowBe4 now was well-prepared for operating their program at scale, and when the pandemic hit they had to pivot their largest conference of the year from in-person to virtual. With the event scheduled just a few weeks after the first global lockdown, The team were quickly able to have all their booked speakers to pre-record content or present their sessions live. All these were then featured in one location via ON24 content hubs, meaning that attending prospects and customers could access all the same content of the conference — and with ON24’s analytics, they were able to track the performance of each event and speed up their follow-up to leads by 2x which was able to speed their time progressing through the funnel and ultimately create stronger and more qualified pipeline, faster.

Over time, KnowBe4’s team has been able to improve the attendee experience further, streamline their processes to save time and use rich engagement data to enhance performance. Their webinars are fully designed to maximize engagement and the team uses their own custom-designed graphics for their calls-to-action. These include links to demos, providing a source of highly-qualified leads. ​​Past webinars are “cloned” and reused as templates, retaining important set-up details while updating event-specific fields, saving hours of work. Surveys are sent automatically after every event to collect feedback on content and gather ideas for future topics. Attendee data is fed directly to sales as soon as a contact is qualified, improving conversions by cutting down on the delays caused by manual processes. 

Furthermore, the rich engagement data and detailed analytics that the ON24 platform provides has allowed KnowBe4 to change its approach to webinars from quantity to quality. Rather than trying to chase ever-higher registration and attendee numbers, the team can optimize their program based on pipeline-creation and opportunity generation. The process and automation capabilities have allowed KnowBe4 to increase their content mix as well, with full-funnel content across their webinars. These include everything from thought leadership webinars, to product demos, and further down the funnel ABM-style personalized webinar experiences. This has allowed them to drive predictable pipeline with their program like never before.

"Our webinars have been hitting upwards of 2,000 registrants. ON24 was the only platform that had the reliability and support we needed — especially with the particularly sensitive webinars we run within the cybersecurity space."

Amanda Nulph, Webinar Marketing Manager

Results

The move to ON24 has enabled KnowBe4 to see a significant uplift in pipeline creation and opportunity generation, as the ON24 platform has allowed them to drive more than 100K leads annually. 

KnowBe4 has also been able to scale the number of webinars it runs by 27%, enabled by both the robustness of the platform and the features that have enabled them to streamline and automate processes. Improved data integration and lead qualification opportunities have also improved marketing’s contribution to pipeline — all while providing an excellent experience for KnowBe4’s prospects and customers.

As an example of KnowBe4’s success, a single webinar campaign attracted nearly 2,000 registrations and more than 900 attendees. As a result, KnowBe4 generated a staggering $300K+ in pipeline in less than two months — a figure still growing as new leads access the session on-demand. For this, ON24 selected KnowBe4 as one of the winners of the 2023 Webinars That Rocked awards.

Even with these results, KnowBe4 is set to improve them further with additional features that the ON24 platform offers. “We’re really looking forward to the new features that ON24 is bringing to market,” said Amanda Nulph, Webinar Marketing

Manager at KnowBe4. “Now we’ve dialed in our programs, we’re excited to be able to test new approaches such as personalizing our webinars and demos to increase engagement and drive better results.”

"ON24 allows us to tie our webinars with our overall demand generation strategy, transforming them into multi-touch experiences. Within any webinar, we offer relevant content ranging from top-of-funnel content like reports, white papers, and upcoming webinars, to bottom-of-funnel calls-to-action for demos and pricing information. Plus, the attendee level data allows us to both optimize offers based on engagement, and to identify who is ready to buy. It has been essential to our success."

Razan Zaghmout, Director of Outbound Marketing

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