UCB transforms digital engagement with ON24-powered omnichannel strategy

The team of UCB Italy – Italian affiliate of a global biopharmaceutical company – that is responsible for engagement with Rheumatologists knew that their audience of healthcare professionals (HCPs) were short on time. Given that, the primary focus of HCPs was immediate patient care, having in-depth, face-to-face conversations with field reps was not always the best option for them.

Webinars had been a solution, but UCB’s marketing team faced several problems: they were finding it difficult to scale their programs; they lacked performance data and analytics to know what was working; and they were unable to elicit strong insights from their customers to deliver an effective HCP-focused strategy. UCB needed to figure out how to communicate and educate HCPs on important topics while acknowledging the time pressures their busy audience faced — and naturally, they wouldn’t attend a virtual event if first they had to fill out long registration forms.

Furthermore, getting HCPs to sign up and attend wasn’t the only challenge — they also had to keep them engaged. Given that HCPs had taken time out to watch a virtual event, naturally, UCB wanted them to feel that it was worthwhile and gain interest in engaging with future experiences. The UCB teams wanted attendees to be an active part of the event, giving them the freedom to interact with both the speakers and attendees while also engaging fully with the options and resources available.

The team needed a platform to enable this. UCB wanted to deliver a scalable strategy that would not only attract more of its target audience to digital events, but would also provide multiple ways to keep the audience engaged with the topic and speakers throughout the webinar. The platform also needed to be easy to use, offer rich customization and be integrated with their CRM so that data could be collected in real-time.

UCB’s omnichannel strategy delivered transformative results. Through its use of the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform, HCPs started attending more webinars and engaging more deeply — with the seamless, one-click process through multi-registration being particularly effective at increasing registration and attendance rates.

This enhanced engagement not only strengthened UCB’s relationship with HCPs, but also provided valuable first-party data insights that were immediately actionable through their integration between ON24 and the company’s CRM and marketing automation platform, namely Veeva and Salesforce Marketing Cloud — both of which have native integrations through ON24 Connect.

The ease of use and efficiency of the ON24 platform benefited UCB in two particular ways. Not only did it make it possible for UCB’s regional team to scale their webinars by 4x, but the automation capability enabled by ON24 also saved them valuable time along the way.

Focusing on high engagement, the regional webinar series saw high interaction rates with polls, with 90 responses in the first webinar alone. Survey feedback from their target audience was resoundingly positive, which can account for the high number of CTA clicks to register for upcoming webinars in the series and content downloads.

Overall, ON24 is enabling UCB to achieve its ultimate omnichannel vision: to be where their customers are, to always provide them with relevant content, and make that content accessible at the right time and through the most relevant channel.