How Celent Elevated Virtual Events and ABM to Drive Engagement with Big Results

Case Study

Stats Bar Moved annual flagship event completely

online with Folloze

5,052 users engaged

658 campaign board clicks (and counting)

Ongoing campaign lead generation

Company Snapshot Financial services consulting and research firm,

focused on global financial firms and solutions providers,

best practices, growth strategies

Nimble team of 50 people, mostly analysts/experts

(insurance, retail, corporate finance, capital markets, risk)

Key assets: a wealth of research and large knowledge

base in financial services technology

Targets: Financial institutions, mostly on the strategy,

technology and innovation side as well as technology

solution providers

How Celent Elevated Virtual Events and ABM to Drive Engagement with Big Results

Folloze empowers you to take your ABM program to the next level by

deeply connecting with every buyer group across your top-tier target

accounts via contextually rich experiences that deliver value and build

trust. With self-service tools that are intuitive and customizable, you are

no longer limited by one-size-fits-all marketing or IT and design

bottlenecks. We make it easy and fast to create relevant, engaging buyer

experiences for your target accounts, backed by deep data insights, in

minutes vs. hours or days — and measure it all.

About Folloze

How Celent Elevated Virtual Events and ABM to Drive Engagement with Big Results

When leading financial research and advisory firm Celent realized limitations

with their website as an e�ective customer engagement platform, they knew

it was time to fast-track a modernized approach. From pivoting their digital

events strategy to accommodate a changing landscape, to orchestrating

better account-based marketing campaigns and outreach, Celent has

become a best-practice benchmark in successfully targeting audiences with

precision and building stronger sales opportunities across the buyer journey.

At the time when Senior Marketing Manager Nicola Segal started with Celent,

the company was struggling to engage and market to customers and

prospects due to the limitations of its website. Chief among them was the

significant time and resources required to spin up new web pages, create

forms, build landing pages, and track incoming leads. Typically turn around

time for the website would take 1 week to create, where a Folloze board

could be created within an hour.

Although Celent had undergone a full rebranding, its website was not yet

updated, making brand control yet another obstacle. Most site pages

reflected old content and branding, and hiring developers to change the site

would be a drain on Celent’s budget. Additionally, there was limited CRM

integration to get data into the primary Salesforce platform, making it di�cult

to map leads and engagement to sales activity.

Introduction

How Celent Elevated Virtual Events and ABM to Drive Engagement with Big Results

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Marketing email outreach was hampered due to lack of integration with

Salesforce, and the inability to send messages from specific individuals

significantly diminished the personal touch in Celent’s email engagement.

A lack of robust analytics capabilities made it hard to see and evaluate all

engagement activity on a particular web page, blocking key insights into

how each account was engaging their brand and content.

Folloze’s Buyer Experience Platform was selected as an easy-to-use tool

for targeted marketing and crafting content pages quickly. Segal, along

with Senior Marketing Associate Shanta Hareesh and the rest of the

Celent marketing team, embraced the new perspective that Folloze

brought to the table and have never looked back.

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Celent launched Folloze just as the pandemic ramped up. With their

flagship Innovation & Insights Day annual event scheduled for April 2020 in

New York, the company made the call early to pivot their strategy and run a

fully digital event.

“March 2020 was a crazy time for everyone; the world was just in total

collapse,” Segal said. “We were able to put our digital marketing hats on

quickly and relied on Folloze to create a fully functional digital home for

the one-day virtual event.”

Celent kicked o� the event with a live webinar, then opened up a library of

over 50 pre-recorded videos on various topics and trends. They hosted

thought-leadership presentations, industry coverage from analysts, and

announced winners from their awards program.

“It was the first time we’d ever done a public, digital-only event like this, and

it went really well,” Segal said. “Folloze was instrumental in helping us set up

and brand the event. It was really easy to promote via social media and email,

and we got a ton of tra�c: over 5,050 engaged users and more than 650

clicks on the campaign board — and we’re still bringing in new leads today.”

Revitalizing Virtual Live Events

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The marketing team put a heavy focus on video, creating and repurposing

specific content for di�erent audiences, and easily tracking which videos each

person was watching. They were able to schedule everything on Folloze and

roll out videos in concert with content over time.

“It really felt like a live event,” Segal said. “We couldn’t have held this

last-minute, digital-only live event just using our website. Folloze made it

all happen for us.”

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After a successful digital launch of the flagship event, the Celent marketing

team continued to hit their stride with Folloze as the foundation. They rolled

out a number of other digital events to keep customer engagement vibrant,

including a highly targeted roundtable for their life insurance practice.

They created a core landing page that included the agenda, speaker

information, and a registration link — and the team was able to drive sign-ups

through a consistent email drip campaign. They were even able to send emails

automatically on behalf of the head of the life insurance practice to support

that group’s reputation and enhance one-to-one engagement. And because

Folloze is fully integrated with Outlook, every outreach ends up in each

person’s inbox — something that Segal said “seems obvious, but is so helpful.”

“We had a pretty impressive open rate of 23% on a mix of cold and warm

leads, so that helped drive registrations,” she added. “We built in teaser

content and announcements along the way and, at the suggestion of the

Folloze team, created a ‘key takeaways’ email to maintain a strong

connection with attendees after the event.”

Creating Digital Events with Flair

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Now that Celent has relaunched in-person events, Folloze is a key marketing

and hosting component for those as well — helping them host materials

online, whip up landing pages, and link to important event updates, speakers,

and reasons to attend.

Celent can easily roll out digital and virtual live events that are completely on

brand. “It’s pretty simple to build the core elements,” Segal said. “We can

bring in our own colors, fonts and images that reflect our brand, and our

target audiences can see that it’s a Celent URL or a customized vanity URL.

That gives us a boost and helps build our reputation on Google.”

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How Celent Elevated Virtual Events and ABM to Drive Engagement with Big Results

Like a growing number of marketing organizations, Celent is embracing ABM

to focus their e�orts on key accounts with better precision and drive higher

conversions.

Celent’s first ABM program was targeted to the capital markets industry. They

created a series of reports that featured relevant research covering ‘Operational

Alpha’ topics (that help their clients optimize operational performance to raise

profitability). They released new reports each month via new Folloze boards

that highlighted di�erent reports and research, and targeted their accounts

with personalized video content accessible via a private link.

That initial campaign targeted 100 companies, more than 15 of which

registered interest with the end result of a couple of new subscriptions closed.

“This was our first shot at ABM and it was really great,” Segal said. “It became

the use case for other industries to follow.”

And as with any ABM-focused campaign, the devil is in the details. It was vital to

have solid coordination across research, sales and marketing teams to make

the program work e�ciently, and Folloze allowed Celent to orchestrate more

collaborative campaigns. “Everyone bought into the campaign — what the

cadence was, who would be responsible for what engagement activity, and

Orchestrating Better ABM Campaigns

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how everyone could stick to the timeline,” Segal said.

Thanks to integration with Salesforce, follow up is now very actionable.

“We no longer have to be the bottleneck for sales to follow up on account

activity,” Segal said. “Now we can create reports within Salesforce and

make those metrics, real-time engagement information (such as how each

account is interacting with specific content), and opportunities about to

expire all available to sales in the place they are most comfortable with.

We even had a BCC field built into Salesforce so that all emails sent and

subsequent leads aren’t missed by an analyst. The key is for us to see

whether or not each account has interacted with us.”

Bottleneck is also quickly becoming a thing of the past for the creative arm of

the Celent marketing team. Instead of relying on developers to complete

campaigns, Segal said her team has been able to create their own in a

fraction of the time it previously took. “We can build and launch a page in

hours, or even minutes if we need to.”

Generated 1800 clicks and 13k engaged on Coronavirus resource hub page

after hosting webinar registrations, on-demand videos and research specific

to COVID through Folloze Platform.

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Today it’s much easier for Celent to engage their audiences at every phase of

the customer lifecycle. And it’s not just about actual revenue generation.

“At the end of the day, it isn’t just about closing a new subscription,” Segal

said. “It’s about creating conversations with each account to keep

engagement ongoing. Campaigns like these enable us to create more

exposure with clients, which leads to more engagement between analysts

and end users.”

Sales teams quickly adopted the Folloze platform and they understand how

powerful it can be as an engagement tool. Sales is armed with information for

better one-to-one outreach, and marketing teams have visibility into key

metrics, including numbers of board visitors, and how much those visitors are

interacting with content. Everyone has visibility into the metrics that are most

essential to their jobs, which has been instrumental to helping the entire

organization thrive in an increasingly digital world. “We’re building a

data-driven marketing organization,” Segal said. “And Folloze has been

instrumental in moving us in that direction.”

It’s All About Ongoing Engagement

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