Michael Masterson’s “Rule of One” says your marketing should focus on a single person, with a single message, and a single next step.
But at B2B Forum 2024, Mark Bornstein from ON24 advised marketers to go the opposite direction.
Hear Mark’s fascinating advice and experiences in this clip from B2B Forum 2024, or read the transcript below.
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The key math is this:
The more you create experiences that are highly engaging and highly interactive, the more you’re going to generate what all marketers are talking about…
The “manna from heaven,” the first party data.
First party data simply means you’re learning about these people.
What are they saying? What are they asking? What are they downloading? What are they signing up for? What are they clicking?
The more we can learn about them, the more effectively we will be able to convert them.
So we need to architect that.
The goal of your webinar is not to get them to show up.
It’s to get them to, a very technical term, “do stuff.” Just like all of you are doing right now.
But if we’re going to do that, we need to architect the experience.
Because our goal is not the form fill.
Our goal is to find out how much we can learn about them through all of the interactivity, through all the comments and the questions and the things that they’re doing.
And I know there’s some fellow “webinerds” in this room. And for those of you who’ve been to my webinars, you know that there’s a lot of stuff going on and there’s lots of interactivity, and we’re talking in lots of different ways and there’s lots of different stuff to do.
And that’s how we need to think about it.
The modern webinar is alive with different ways that our audience can engage.
I always tell everybody, put the entire buyer’s journey of actionable things that people can do in every single experience.
So there are a billion different… no, I don’t know how many there are… but we’ve got like 26 different conversion and interactivity tools available that you can integrate into these systems.
(I don’t know why I attend so many webinars. It’s the business I’m in.)
And so many of them will have a blank, like a screen and a presenter, and maybe one thing, maybe a Q&A box, because “we’re interactive! We do Q&A at the end!”
That’s not what I’m talking about.
We have an opportunity. What is your goal? What do you want have happen with that audience? Do you want to drive them to a demo? Do you want to get them to a free trial? Do you want to get them to a meeting? Do you have a big in-person event coming up that you’d like to drive them to? Do you want to get them to another webinar?
So we’ve put this entire buyer’s journey—a whole funnel of interactivity and engagement and CTAs—in every single touchpoint.
What I’m telling you about today is more than just webinars.
This should apply to every webpage they go to. It should apply to every outbound content experience and every inbound content experience.
Every time you have an audience touchpoint, people should be surrounded with a buyer’s journey of options of things to do, so they can self-select their way to what they need right then and there.
All right, so let’s build a hypothetical webinar together. And let’s say that we’re going to have a key CTA and that CTA is going to be to drive a meeting. And if we can get two or three or four or 5% of our audience to raise their hand and book a meeting? Awesome.
Alright, we’re going to put this big fuchsia box. “Hey, do you want to book a meeting?” Cool, right?
But I know not everybody’s going to be ready for that. So let’s put some secondary CTAs in there.
Maybe we’ll have an NPS poll to ask them how happy they are with their current solution.
We’ll have a survey, and we’ll put some qualifying questions in that survey.
Maybe we’ll even ask them to book a meeting in the survey, too, so there’s two chances at that. We do that all the time. It really works well, by the way.
Tip: ask for a meeting in the survey. Sometimes you’ll get more meetings that way.
You’ll maybe upload lots of different types of content. Maybe you’ve got three or four different solution types. And by the type that people download, it’ll tell you what they’re interested in and on and on and on.
And we can begin to architect an experience that gives everybody a lot of options and tells us where they are.
If they book a meeting, we know there’s intent, they’re ready to buy.
If they hit the NPS hole and they maybe go over a seven or a six, we know they’re ready to switch. We know a little bit about them.
Maybe the survey tells us they’re ready for a solution.
We get these signals, intent signals, interest signals.
Maybe they’re just educating themselves. That’s okay. We need to know where they are in that journey.
And that’s what really great engagement does, and that’s what every digital experience should do.
Lemme show you an example in the real world.
This is S&P Global. You wouldn’t think of financial services, big giant financial services companies, as being cutting edge marketers. But they are.
And you could see this event has got all kinds of stuff you can do.
They’ve got a demo of some financial packages they were trying to drive people to, so it’s available.
But they were also linking to all kinds of web pages and different types of content that you could download.
You could sign up for that demo in two different places.
They were linking to an on-demand hub where you could then go and binge on more content.
They didn’t let the journey end. There was more to do. There was more to do.
That’s what great marketing does.
Published June 11, 2025
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