Trade magazine publisher UP Media Group has planned a November trade show, using ON24’s recently launched Virtual Show technology.
Virtual Show offers a customizable online venue for trade shows and conferences that tracks individual attendees — providing sponsor companies with data on document downloads, presentations viewed, participation in discussions and responses to polls. The venue also provides opportunities for social networking, chatting and group meetings, and ON24’s “Smart” Booths help exhibitors provide personalized content to all booth visitors, based on their profiles.
“More people are getting information through the Internet, and more people find it difficult to travel or choose not to, so Virtual Shows are a great complement to our live shows,” said Frances Stewart, VP sales and marketing for UP Media Group. “One real value proposition is that ON24 gathers a lot of data on attendees, which is really critical for exhibitors to be able to capture and pre-qualify those individuals.”
UP Media’s show audience consists of readers and advertisers for its magazines. Readers are engineers and others involved in the design and manufacture of circuit boards. Advertisers are companies that provide goods and services to circuit board companies.
UP will leverage its 80,000-name database to advertise the show though targeted HTML blasts. Print and online messages will also promote the show. Stewart said she hopes that the show will help extend the brand and provide more ways for customers to interact directly with UP Media.
“This is very much a direct marketing kind of tool because, from a demand generation and lead generation point of view, people are sending thousands of e-mails to draw audiences to the show,” said Sharat Sharan, CEO of ON24. “People come in and they register and it tells where they are coming from along with other information. When they go to the show and download and spend time and connect with different people all that information is being tracked and then provided to our customer.
“The most important thing is to get very targeted people coming to the shows, and at the end of day this is about data and qualifying prospects and integrating that information into CRM systems and closing sales.”
Many of ON24’s customers come from the publishing sector, along with technology and life sciences. Sharan sees Virtual Show as a way for ON24 to better engage the b2c market as well.
The first ON24 Virtual Show takes place this month. Sharan predicts that ON24 will hold 150-200 virtual shows next year.
