By Tim Johnston, Director of Demand Generation, APAC, ON24

For marketers, data is difficult. It's easy to get, yes, but being able to draw out any meaningful insights or actions can be an exercise in pulling the hair out of your head.

Why is extracting insights from data so stressful? There are a few theories. First, our jobs are on the line. We need to be able to provide sales with qualified leads and context to land business. Failing that, we risk our positions. Second, we're trying to divine the wants and needs of a large group of professionals through one of the most obtuse methods ever devised — abstracted numbers and maybe a few pie charts if you're lucky.

And these numbers, generally, don't get any easier to read over time as most data comes from superficial, automated interactions. These interactions do little other than giving sales a phone number to cold call.

We need to change how we approach data — how we perceive our audience. Marketers need learn to engage — not just interact — with their prospect and clients to get a better picture of what they need. Through engagement-driven marketing, marketers can find the leads ready for a sales conversation — complete with what content that particular lead interacted with last, what they may be hung up on about a solution and how sales can keep the conversation going.

Best yet, this helps marketers to tie their actions to revenue.

There are a few ways marketers can realise this engagement-driven method. For example, one of the best tools available today are webinars (coincidentally, we’re hosting a nearby event to discuss just how webinars and marketers can drive engagement). Webinars work as an engagement-marketing tool not just because they can hold an attendee's attention for a half-hour to an hour, but because they offer audiences the opportunity to talk and interact with their hosts. In-webinar tools — like questions, polls, surveys, social media and more — give marketers the opportunity to not just make their event more interactive, but to also gauge interest and, yes, generate more data on an audience member's content consumption habits.

At ON24, we’ve built our platform to provide marketers with a tool to engage their prospects and customers, and then turn those engagements into insights their sales team can use. Every webinar generates more than 40 data points per attendee. Combined with data over the course of a prospective or client relationship, and you’ve got a much better picture of the human behind the screen.

So how can your organisation start moving toward an engagement-driven model? It's not just about getting a webinar tool — it's about how your organisation approaches marketing, data and empathy with your customers. You'll need to take-in data with a purpose, or as we call it, engagement-driven data. This is what we'll discuss at Webinar World 2018 APAC, on May 31. Hosted at Doltone House in Hyde Park, Sydney, our day-long event will examine what it means to engage on a personal level in today's digital world.

If you want to learn more about how to take your marketing efforts and webinar campaigns to the next level, join us and hundreds of other marketers at Webinar World at Doltone House in Hyde Park, Sydney on May 31.

Register for the free, full day event here