Skip to main content

WMC Interviews: Sharat Sharan


This week, I had the opportunity to learn more about how Sharat Sharan, president and CEO of webcasting and rich media platform provider ON24, has built this company into a leader in online lead generation and communication. ON24 provides a hosted platform to help B2B marketers and other business professionals produce webcasts, podcasts and rich media presentations for prospects, customers, employees, analysts and investors.

ON24 is also the company behind Insight24.com, a hosting service for thought leadership rich media B2B webcasts, podcasts, videos and demos from leading B2B vendors.

WebMarketCentral (WMC): What did you do before ON24?

Sharat Sharan (SS): I was Group Vice President of Hearst New Media Group in New York. Before that, I was responsible for business development for Wireless Networks at AT&T.


WMC: How and when did you get started in this business?

SS: When I joined ON24, the company had a different business model. During the downturn, the business model was challenged. Since our original business enabled us to create a strong brand within the financial services and technology worlds, we leveraged that as we started to migrate the model in 2001.

That’s when we started focused on live webcasting events. Of course with a lot of hard work, execution and some luck, we were able to win more customers. We launched our first product in 2002 and now are the global leader in this category.


WMC: Who is your ideal or typical client?

SS: For us, webcasting is a horizontal application in which each company in the world has a need for it. With that said, we have several types of customers from enterprises to pharmaceutical, medical devices, publishing, life sciences and government. Each of these customers leverages our webcasting and rich media marketing solutions in several ways.

We focus on enterprise applications that companies are using for lead generation, product launches, internal communications and more. So our customers are the marketing departments of large companies, such as Cisco and IBM. Since many publishers use ON24 to power their webinars, publishing is another focus for us. These publishers are providing end-to-end lead generation webinars to technology customers. And then we have continuing professional education (CPE) customers in medical and audit categories. These customers use ON24 for CPE webcasts.


WMC: Who exactly do you view as your competition—and what sets you apart from them?

SS: ON24 is in a unique position as we provide a wide range of webcasting and rich media marketing solutions based on our close working relationships with our customers. Our customers turn to us for our outstanding professional services, our scalable and reliable technology platform and our ability to innovate in terms of how webcasting and rich media can be applied to enhance their marketing and lead generation agenda.

There may be companies that have components of these solutions, but from a comprehensive level, we believe that this truly sets us apart from everyone else.


WMC: How do you market and promote your business?

SS: Our goal is to constantly demonstrate the value that our webcasting and rich media marketing solutions provides to our customers. For us, we’ve been fortunate to have customers who recognize how our products and solutions benefit their corporate and marketing initiatives. Our customers have become advocates who either communicate the value internally to other departments and colleagues or who actively participate with us on customer case studies, testimonials and media references. Combined with our customer relations efforts, we are also very aggressive in our lead generation activities, of course using webcasting as part of our marketing mix, tradeshows and public relations efforts.


WMC: What's the biggest or most important marketing lesson you've learned since you started ON24?

CC: I think the most important thing, which is part of Marketing 101 or Product 101, is to be extremely close to your customers. In a category like ours, in which people were initially concerned about the complexities of audio and video but its now an important part of the future, we have to constantly hear from customers about the types of applications that they want. We want to know what they’re thinking about, as this is the only way that we can adapt our offerings to support them. For example 3-4 years ago, lead generation webinars didn’t exist. And now, nearly 50% of the webinars we host are for lead generation purposes.

New applications are evolving and as we stay close to our customers to understand their needs and to develop new applications that address these needs.


WMC: What inspired you to start Insight24.com?

SS: As I mentioned, we listen to our customers. We recognized that live webcasts are great for lead generation, with a majority of the audience attending during the live webcast and another 25-30% within the first week after the live webcast. We learned that many of customers would then have all of the archived webcasts but they were focused on the next campaign, so all of this content was sitting hidden on corporate websites or just not being used.

Secondly, when we started looking developing Insight24, a report came out highlighting how business and IT professionals preferred to receive their content. A vast majority indicated that they learned about solutions and companies through webcasts and podcasts.

We realized that by developing Insight24, we could provide two benefits—a resource for business and IT professionals to research solutions and compare vendors, while extending the shelf-life of rich media content for increased ROI.


WMC: Anything else you'd like to add?

SS: We are constantly looking at how we can better serve our customers and this was a great opportunity to share our thoughts. Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you and your readers Tom.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Comments

Alexander said…
Great post, very interesting

All Time Greats

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

All businesses that want to attract customers online, no matter the business size or age, have few options other than Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO In The Box™ by Results Driven Marketing®, LLC There are roughly 1.8 billion websites online, and basic SEO allows Google to find and index or catalog your webpages.  After that, Google serves you up to searchers in the organic section.  The question remains: where they list your site, on page one or page 22 or further back? SEO controls your positioning. Do you want to be found online or not? If your business is online or you want your product or service to be found online, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must, and knowing how to use SEO to leverage the power of the internet is vital. Arguably, an effective SEO strategy gets you on the organic results section of the search engine results pages (SERP). Organic traffic is highly valuable and requires high-quality SEO. But even businesses that use l

Marketo Releases Marketo Lead Management 3.0

Marketing automation software vendor Marketo today announced the launch of its Marketo Lead Management 3.0 software suite. With more than 200 new features, the release is the most significant since the product's initial launch in early 2008. Promising deeper support for a "conversational model of marketing," the new release provides 75 user interface enhancements as well as new features including: More fine-grained control over segmentation, targeting, and triggering; "Progressive profiling" on forms (i.e. additional profile is requested as a prospect moves through an interactive process); Native integration with Salesforce.com ; Web visitor profiling; and Automated duplicate lead removal. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month and the company now has more than 150 midmarket and enterprise customers. Marketo competes with products such as Eloqua , Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz), and Manticore in the marketing automation / demand generation sp

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Optimize Your Site

Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing and an seo strategy can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! Optimize Your Site to Improve Search Engine Rankings Most small business owners know that their websites need to be optimized in order for search engines, like Google and Bing, to find them and rank them on the search engine results page. If you don’t know, that’s okay. You can learn all about Search Engine Optimization and SEO best practices here to help impr

Top-Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Advertisements That Make Sense

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource ! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper DM advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective Digital Marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top notch-digital marketing tip! Advertisement Congruence If your business is running ads this is one of our most important online marketing tips! Ad congruence is when your ads and landing pages look alike or have the same message. Have you ever clicked on an ad and been taken to a page that looked nothing like the ad? When your ads look like the web pages they lead to, customers will feel like they are in

Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEM

Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the fastest-growing categories in all of advertising, because it is both measurable and logical: present your ads when people are searching for what you're selling. A well-crafted search marketing program can provide not only broad brand exposure at a very reasonable cost (with CPMs of $10 or less), but also high-ROI lead generation. As with any other type of advertising, however, a poorly-designed campaign will be a disappointing waste of money. In addition to best practices in search engine marketing , the following articles and blog posts were among the best of 2007 at providing helpful guidance for creating and managing effective search marketing programs. Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign by Search Engine Guide Blogger Jennifer Laycock explains how common mistakes such as "ego bidding," writing a single ad for all keywords, and directing all of your traffic to a single landing page can limit the res

The Best Web Marketing of 2008

Which types of online advertising provide the highest ROI? Who's really clicking on your PPC ads? Why do PPC costs keep rising? How can you convert more clickers into buyers? Are Web 2.0 technologies now mainstream? Learn these answers and more from this collection of blog posts and articles, some of the best reporting on online research topics so far this year. Online Marketers See High ROI from SEO by Marketing Pilgrim Blogger, SEO expert and PR pro Janet Meiners reports on an MarketingSherpa study detailing the growth in paid search and organic search engine optimization. Read her post to discover which types of online advertising get a thumbs up—and which are losing favor with interactive marketers. Who's really clicking? by iMedia Connection Sandeep Krishnamurthy , Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce at the University of Washington, paints a bleak picture of the future of PPC advertising—then gets blasted for it in the Comments by some fairly high-profile