Webinars have long been a very productive marketing tool. Their use in overall marketing plans has only grown over time as video conferencing technology continues to advance. The circumstances created by the Covid-19 pandemic only increased their prevalence and effectiveness. The companies powering the various webinar products allow you to sort through attendance and invite data. Once this data is brought into the Marketo Engage platform, it can be leveraged to trigger an advanced set of automation tools that were built to save you and your staff time and missed opportunities, let us explain.
Webinar Acceptance
The internet changes at a rapid pace. Whereas it was the stuff of science fiction films in the 80’s, video conferencing has since become a de facto part of everyday life for virtually everyone with a smartphone. Since most people are now familiar with video interactions over the internet, even putting the pandemic as an accelerating issue aside, it makes perfect sense that taking conferences and presentations online has become a popular, cost-effective way to market products and services.
As more and more companies incorporate the practice into their business plans, webinars have become and will continue to be central in the execution of marketing strategies. They are a great way to provide a personal, human touch but still allow that interaction to scale across multiple users. Webinars can also increase your credibility as an authority. It can really demonstrate your understanding of the subject matter when you can participate in conversational dialogue on the topic. You can also bolster your credibility by inviting other experts into your conversations potentially leveraging any audience those experts have as well.
Marketing is often judged on its ROI. Webinars usually offer a great ROI because they can contribute to so many tasks early in a sales lifecycle. Webinars are about creating awareness in your audience and building engagement simultaneously. Webinar formats that include Q&A sessions are literally combining both aspects in real time. They also offer your team a chance to showcase particular people and their personality. You can allow them to lay the foundation of a relationship with many potential customers at once by putting a face, voice, and personality to otherwise written communication.
Making Sense of the Data
As you host your webinars, you will also be producing a significant amount of data around who was invited, who RSVP’d, and who actually attended, and even who asked qualifying questions during the webinar. Some of this data will be useful in an after the fact analysis. Some of it can be leveraged during pre webinar communication to hopefully nudge the overall success of the program upward. In any case, sorting through all of this data in any sort of manual fashion is unwieldy and prone to error. However, all of the information can be managed by the Marketo Engage platform which will remove human error in processing all the data points.
Using your own customized logical flows, you can manage an entire webinar campaign from the initial invites to scoring the attendance of each member of the campaign. Outside of managing the webinar program itself, Marketo also allows you to merge the individual webinar into larger strategies your organization may be pursuing. For instance, as previously mentioned, your audience’s actions can be incorporated into your scoring strategy, or the very conception of your webinar could be rooted in an ABM strategy, essentially accelerating conversion and visibility of leads through the funnel.
As a leader in marketing automation, Marketo Engage offers integrations with the major webinar providers. These direct integrations for platforms such as Webex, GoToWebinar, and On24 make managing webinar events even easier by automatically sharing information like attendance status. However, even if you are using a smaller webinar platform without a pre-built integration, all it takes to get the pertinent data into Marketo is the invention and adoption of procedures around exporting lists from your provider and importing them into your Marketo instance. You could even look into your own custom API integration if you don’t have the resources for the more manual transfer.
Enter Leadous
Since we want to make sure we can always provide our clients with the best Marketo experience possible, we are of course well versed in running webinar campaigns using the platform. If you are looking for the technical knowhow to put together a best practice webinar program, our team can provide you with a fully tested build. If you need help targeting your audience, our team can help you strategize. We stay on top of trends and can help guide your company when questions come up such as, “What day of the week should we host this event?” or “How far out should we start promoting our webinar?”
Whatever your individual needs or limitations, Leadous’ experts can help bridge the gap between where you are and where you need to be. Get in touch with our team to find out what Leadous can bring to your webinar strategy.