ROI on first-touch opportunities from virtual events using the ON24 platform
more sourced pipeline compared to previous in-person summit
increase in reach for Box’s annual BoxWorks event by adding virtual events
Name: Box
Headquarters: Redwood City, CA
Founded: 2005
Employees: 1,001-5,000
Industry: Technology
Box is an enterprise cloud content management platform. The company empowers organizations to revolutionize how they work by securely connecting their people, information and applications. Box powers more than 87,000 businesses globally.
Box makes it simple to collaborate across teams, customers, partners and vendors, as well as access files from any device at any time.
“Our goal is to help people work and collaborate better. We put our customers at the heart of everything we do,” said Kendall Carraher, Principal Campaign Manager at Box.
The company puts the same focus on collaboration internally. The Campaigns Team handles all content going into market including digital experiences, as well as all online events. The Physical Events Team has shared goals and follows the same directives to drive demand and revenue.
Various teams at Box work together to leverage resources such as digital experiences. This collaborative approach helps optimize workload—for example, by developing only one piece of creative and using it for both physical and virtual events.
A small team with big plans to execute
It’s common for virtual events teams to be small but mighty. At Box, Carraher and her colleague Ashesh Satvedi, Head of Virtual Events, operated as a duo for a long time. While Carraher and Satvedi now have an additional team member to help them, their scope of work has also increased.
This shift in direction toward more online events is partially due to the fact that Box’s Leadership Team has seen a great deal of value in these events, including their potential to expand the number of people that brands can reach with their marketing. However, this new digital-focused approach meant Box needed a Platform to help facilitate an increase in virtual events to generate pipeline and revenue.
“Pipeline comes naturally, but customer experience and what our attendees get out of our events has been our biggest learning. We’re constantly iterating based on that.”
ASHESH SATVEDI
HEAD OF VIRTUAL EVENTS, BOX
A robust live and on-demand strategy
Today, Box uses ON24 Webcast Elite to engage its audience with live digital experiences, which later become available to view on-demand on the company’s website. Box’s webinar program has grown over the past few years, and the organization now makes use of slides, audio, video and gamification in its digital experiences.
“We try to make sure the topics we select for each quarter resonate with different audiences. Some topics are suited to developer and IT admin roles, while others are more for managers, directors and above,” Satvedi said.
Box has recently evolved its digital experience program to include fireside chat- and panel-style events, which involve conversations among two or three speakers. The company is also testing hybrid events, which are regional, in-person events broadcasted digitally to expand their reach to a larger audience.
“Once a physical event is over, that’s it. If you registered and for any reason you couldn’t make it, you missed out. We find that the biggest benefit of hybrid events is that we can send you a recording if you can’t attend. It becomes something we can use to continue to drive on-demand views, even after the event is over,” Satvedi said.
Box also leverages ON24 Virtual Conference to enhance its virtual summits, which are the company’s biggest online events. “So much content gets created for our annual conference, as well as for different webinars throughout the year. A virtual summit gives us the platform to use all of that content in a packaged way,” Satvedi said.
With ON24 Virtual Conference, Box can create interactive lobbies for attendees, facilitate informal learning opportunities through group chats and develop centralized resource libraries of training content. “We put time and energy into creating these virtual summits because the pipeline speaks for itself,” Carraher said.
One of Box’s main objectives is to reach a larger audience, and the company has been successful in this area. Using the ON24 platform, Box saw a 70% increase in reach for its annual BoxWorks event. The organization also achieved 112% ROI on first-touch opportunities from virtual events. In addition, Box has generated 2 times more sourced pipeline with these events compared to its previous in-person summit.
“The ROI on first-time attendees alone is paying for the ON24 platform,” Carraher said.
Digital experiences also enable Box to forge strong partnerships. Partners participate in the company’s virtual summits, and Box offers them virtual booths with a minimum of 200 visitors to each booth.
“Our partners at the BoxWorks virtual summit can download information about every interaction at their virtual booth. It’s an added benefit for them, with really no extra lift from us—and it’s built into the ON24 functionality.”
KENDALL CARRAHER
PRINCIPAL CAMPAIGN MANAGER, BOX
