“We’ve been using webinars and other video content for quite a while, primarily because it works. Video content tends to perform really well when it comes to bottom-of-funnel leads.”
Hitachi Vantara, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., guides customers from what’s now to what’s next by solving their digital challenges. Working alongside each customer, they apply unmatched industrial and digital capabilities to their data and applications to benefit both business and society. More than 80% of the Fortune 100 trust Hitachi Vantara to help them develop new revenue streams, unlock competitive advantages, lower costs, enhance customer experiences, and deliver social and environmental value.
As the leading provider of digital infrastructure, data management and analytics, and digital solutions, Hitachi Vantara has found webinars to be an incredibly effective way to engage mid-market+ companies and deliver high-quality, bottom-of-funnel leads. So, when they need to drive more pipeline more consistently with a specific account persona, they know to turn to BrightTALK’s platform and audience.
Hitachi Vantara needed a dependable, scalable lead gen process and mix of leads from the broad target market that exists for their midrange storage solution. The challenge was to build a better program—the right tactics combined in a strategy—that could get that done in a dependable, scalable way. Because Midrange buyers are so widely distributed, Hitachi Vantara needed to cast a wide net that would help them both successfully educate likely suspects and consistently bring the active buyers—the down funnel leads—into their pipeline more effectively.
BrightTALK has been a partner of Hitachi Vantara since the brand’s inception in 2017 (and for HitachiData Systems since 2011). They continue to use the webinar medium and access to the BrightTALK audience as a critical channel and content format in their demand gen strategy because it’s been a successful way to drive bottom-of-the-funnel leads in particular. Knowing the success they’d experienced in the past, the demand gen team turned to webinar content again to engage midrange buyers specifically because of the combination of the firmographic diversity of the target audiences and the flexibility of the product category.
This assignment could not be adequately served by a generalized one-size-fits-all outbound package.Instead, the team uses a midrange webinar series approach, consisting of five-webinar packages delivered on the BrightTALK platform. The episodes are created to work together, to create a much more holistic representation of Hitachi Vantara’s midrange solutions—some 225 minutes of rich content, the ability to ask questions of experts and more. These series run every quarter, one episode per week, adjusted for time zones, to make them readily available and easy to consume. It’s definitely always on for their audience.
To ensure that leads from the program are being followed up properly, the program team runs specific training for the designated catchers wherever they may be. And to further assist, each webinar travels with a one-sheet outline, includingFAQs, follow up questions, and next-step resources.
“We’re able to pull data fromBrightTALK that tells us exactly how long each person watched our webinar, and we’ve been able to automate that scoring process, so anyone who watches80% or more of a webinar is[now] automatically an MQL.”
All of this is packaged within their CRM system to sync with the correct lead types, so that sellers can easily prep their outreach.
Though the basic program has been running for more than a year, Hitachi Vantara believes it has not yet harvested the full extent of the impact the core material can still deliver. Their Sales teams have continued to report good lead specificity and quality each quarter.
“[Our] sales team has comeback to us with really good feedback on the lead quality and specificity [for our webinar series].”
Driving adequate lead volumes for Hitachi Vantara’s mid-range storage solution to broad audiences can be difficult to scale via typical outbound means.Buyers are very widely distributed and very diverse, so dependable lead flows become difficult to create and manage.
To deliver on their needs,Hitachi Vantara created a continuously rolling webinar series within the BrightTALK platform capable of supporting a richer, more encompassing representation of their midrange solutions. The series leverages five different takes on the topic, runs every quarter, one episode per week, adjusted for time zones and optimized as it continues.
Hitachi Vantara’s program has been running for more than a year, with impact still growing. Sales teams continue to report good lead specificity and quality each quarter. Marketing is very satisfied with the balance of lead qualification levels it is able to deliver dependably.