BtoB marketers have embraced more interactive content formats to provide prospects and customers with valuable information in an engaging, informative manner. Webinars have become an increasingly critical component of the BtoB buying process, as 35% of BtoB buyers cited webinars as the most useful resource in the early stages of the buying process in the Inside The Mind Of The BtoB Buyer Survey, conducted by DemandGen Report. Additionally, nearly 30% said webinars influenced their selection of a solution provider during the research and purchase process.
While webinars have already been established as a go-to platform to engage both prospects and customers, the value has been greatly increased by the recent introduction of new solutions that enable webinars to be integrated with marketing automation technology. These new integration points allow marketers to connect disparate campaign efforts, streamline customer relationship management (CRM) and rev up internal efficiency.
Many organizations have traditionally relied on a variety of solutions and processes to collect and organize webinar information. Getting these solutions and processes to function cohesively has been a daunting task, and often involved tedious manual work.
Critical time has often been wasted in following up on webinar information as marketers wait for the data to be sent to their systems, reducing productivity and efficiency.
Marketers have been operating webinars and marketing automation separately, attempting to connect the data from the two manually, which can be time consuming and yield inaccurate results. New integration solutions are making it easier to bring these two key marketing operations together, which also helps marketers extend the value of their investments and data collection.
Progressive marketers are now leveraging these new tools to create robust integrations between online event platforms and their lead management systems. These integrations enhance and extend the value of investments by maximizing efficiency, productivity and data accuracy. Developers can build seamless integrations, or Application Program Interfaces (APIs), that automatically pull all the registrant and attendee information that would typically be gleaned from webinar platform reports.
This eBook will highlight the potential for BtoB organizations to enhance prospect, customer and internal communication through the use of
integrations and APIs. Additionally, the eBook will spotlight the key benefits of capturing webinar data and saving it to marketing automation platforms, and
Executive Summary
35% of BtoB buyers cited webinars as
the most useful resource in the early
stages of the buying process.
For many marketers, webinars are an under-utilized lead generation tool, because, from an administrative perspective, it can be difficult to set up, promote and follow up on registrants and attendees.
“Webinars or online events represent a vital component of a company’s demand generation and can generate a large percentage of new prospects,” said Gaurav Kotak, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Marketo, a provider of Revenue Performance Management and marketing automation solutions. “By integrating online event platforms with lead management solutions that tightly integrate with CRM systems,
marketers can ensure prospect data is added into the CRM in real-time, and capture key behaviors of the prospect that include registering and attending the event. This should replace the disconnected, Excel-only approach.”
While many marketers clearly understand the value of hosting online events for brand awareness and thought leadership education, connecting the dots between automation technology and webinar platforms has previously been
a tedious task. Additionally, correlating webinar attendee information and activity with key automation features, such as scoring or nurturing, has left many marketers falling short and unable to realize the full value of their investments.
By integrating webinars with marketing automation, marketers can glean immediate benefits around improving the effectiveness and efficiency of online events. Additionally, a seamless connection between webinars and a marketing automation platform offers serious value for users.
Capturing The True Value Of Webinars
“Webinars or online events represent
a vital component of a company’s
demand generation and can generate
a large percentage of new prospects.”
“Users have the ability to automatically feed attendance data from webinars into the platform, eliminating the need to manually import registration
data,” noted Steve Woods, Chief Technology Officer at Eloqua, a provider of Revenue Performance Management and marketing automation platforms. “This not only reduces user error but saves marketers hours of precious time. Based on attendance information, marketers can trigger the right follow-up message and incorporate this prospect information into their lead nurturing and lead scoring programs.”
APIs enable marketers to import a variety of critical information to the database automatically, including upcoming webinars and session; complete sessions within a specified date range; organizers and panelists who participated in a particular webinar; collated poll feedback received during a session; and session performance details about a session.
Industry experts suggest the expanded ability to integrate
webinar data with marketing automation platform can help
marketers with the following areas:
•
Save time by cutting out manual steps and loading
lead information faster;
•
Increase accuracy of lead data, customer flexibility and
productivity;
•
Optimize processes;
•
Leverage webinar information across multiple systems;
•
Load lead information from the webinar faster; and
Marketers rely heavily on their ability to effectively track prospect and customer behavior to fuel appropriate offers and engagements. Automation technology helps marketers establish communication (email marketing); keep in contact (nurturing); progress leads through the sales cycle (scoring); and enhance the value proposition (content offers).
As webinars have been established as a key marketing metric for BtoB
organizations to engage and message to prospects, marketers can use specific engagement data from webinars to determine which leads to nurture and/or which follow up campaigns a lead should receive.
Formerly disconnected from one another, marketing automation and webinar platforms have acted as standalone tools. By integrating the two operations, marketers can now maximize the value of their investments by aligning internal, disparate teams and more effectively understanding how to act on behavioral data.
Coupled with prospect behavior tracked prior to webinar registration, data collected through the event can enhance marketers’ knowledge of contacts.
Marketers can automatically feed relevant attendance data from webinars into the marketing automation system that provides answers to key questions including:
•
Who registered? (Prospect title, company, location of attendee and contact information)•
Who attended? Did the prospect attend? If so, did the prospect attend the entire webinar or drop off at a certain point?•
What did they do? (Poll and survey data taken during the webinar)Double Data Duty: Optimizing The Behavioral Attributes Of Webinar Contacts
Name:
Title:
Webinar data can help marketers enrich their lead profiles — and engagement data from webinars can be used to adjust a lead score, or to trigger
automated responses.
“Marketers can now see how engaged a prospect is during a webinar, and can automatically push much of this information into their CRM, or automation system,” noted Andy Pitre, Marketing Evangelist at HubSpot, a provider of inbound marketing software. “When combined with the data that they have already collected for a lead through their web site, social media, etc., this information is helpful in creating a richer profile.”
While the tactical benefits of integration are immediate, the long-term benefits can help fuel overall business objectives and growth.
Gathering prospect data through webinars ultimately helps marketers further understand the buyer and is an important step toward achieving Revenue Performance Management,” Woods said. “The long term goal of Revenue Performance Management is to get a full view of the buyer and an understanding of their propensity to buy. Integrating prospect data from webinars provides one aspect of the overall view and a strong indicator of purchase intent.”
The Follow Up Fix:
Integrating Webinar Data With Marketing Automation
Any marketer knows that timing is critical, and it’s even more
imperative to follow up with the hottest leads after a marketing
webinar. Using an integration built with APIs, marketers can
automatically pull information on:
•
Who registered;
•
Which registrants actually attended;
•
Which attendees stayed for the whole webinar; and
•
Who responded positively to the presentation.
Marketing automation is helping organizations centralize campaign
management to efficiently compete in the buyer-savvy market. And while a great deal of organizations utilizes this technology to success, many still struggle to understand the value of specific functionalities.
Online event platforms that integrate with marketing automation platforms — like GoToWebinar — can leverage automation capabilities, such as scoring and nurturing, to attract prospects to the event and post-event follow up.
“Through lead scoring, demographic targeting or event-based triggers,
marketers can invite the right prospects based on the objective and topic of the webinar,” Kotak noted. “For example, if the objective is new lead generation, target a broad audience and invite practitioners; whereas if the objective of the webinar is to move mid-stage prospects through the funnel, then invite prospects with a certain lead score or who have shown some buying intent like downloading a case study or visiting the price page.”
Marketers also can link webinars with automation technology to:
•
Easily follow best practices such as one-click registration and timely reminders;•
Systematically add online events as a step of a multi-step, multi-channel nurturing campaign;•
Streamline post-event follow up;•
Modify lead score based on prospect registration or attendance;•
Automate the right follow up immediately after the webinar, such as a “Thank You” email if they attended, or a “Sorry we missed you, here is the recording” message if they did not attend; and•
Add prospects to the relevant nurturing program based on their participation in the events as well as the demographic and Budget; Authority; Need; Timing (BANT) information.In order to be most effective, marketers need one central database to store and share updated lead and contact information. The information collected in this database should not be limited to webinar engagement data and should include form submission, page views, web site sessions and email engagement, among other attributes.
Marketers previously had to deal with a significant amount of prospect and customer data, garnered from various touch points and engagements. Aligning this information with a CRM system and understanding how to effectively leverage behavior or attributes can be challenging. Centralized tracking offers operational enhancements that enable marketers to enhanced closed-loop reporting by attributing leads, customers and revenue with specific marketing activities. For webinars specifically,
marketers can establish whether the effort and investment has paid off.
“If marketers are fully integrated, they can even go a step further and calculate which activities either before or after the webinar contributed to higher lead quality and close rate,” Pitre said. “This can give marketers a better understanding of which leads they should be promoting particular webinars
to, and what type of follow up should be sent around.”
Pitre continued, “One of the biggest benefits of having access to an API from a webinar service is the ability to automatically sync your leads across multiple tools including your CRM. Downloading, uploading and editing files in excel is not only time consuming, but also risky because it leaves room for human error.”
Streamline & Supplement CRM Via Integrations
Marketers previously had to deal with
a significant amount of prospect and
customer data, garnered from various
touch points and engagements.
How Integration Yields Better Information:
With GoToWebinar APIs, progressive marketers are able
to import the following information into their databases
automatically:
•
Upcoming webinars
•
Upcoming sessions (including session times)
•
Completed sessions within a specified date range
•
Organizers and panelists who participated in a particular
webinar
•
Questions asked and answers given during a webinar
•
Collated poll feedback received during a session
•
Collated survey feedback received during a session
•
Performance details about a session
•
Answers a particular attendee gave to session polls
GoToWebinar now features built-in integrations with marketing automation and software providers including Eloqua, Marketo and HubSpot. Using the GoToWebinar APIs, developers can build seamless integrations that automatically pull all the registrant and attendee information that you would usually get from GoToWebinar reports into a different marketing program, seamlessly and automatically. No more running Excel reports, updating fields and importing into a third-party tool. Automation cuts out these steps, getting your lead-generation efforts in motion faster and eliminating the errors of manual work.
Marketers already using Eloqua, Marketo and HubSpot services are able to connect these accounts with their GoToWebinar account to aggregate webinar data and analytics into one easy-to-read report. Leveraging the GoToWebinar APIs to integrate with third party or in-house marketing solutions helps you eliminate redundant tasks, reduce potential entry errors and increase your follow-up speed. Visit the Citrix GoTo Developer Center to register and access the APIs, view the API documentation and communicate and collaborate with other
developers and Citrix Online experts.
GoToWebinar’s integration with Eloqua automatically syncs webinar data into the Eloqua Cloud Connector to eliminate
manual work and shorten lead response time.
BtoB buyers now expect interactive content, but also seamlessly integrated engagement at every possible touch point. This has been a struggle for most marketers due to a lack of structured alignment of key operating tasks, specifically for marketing automation and webinars.
By integrating the reporting and intelligence from webinar platforms with marketing automation systems, progressive marketers are realizing more efficient means of “connecting the dots” between campaign efforts, content offerings and real opportunities.
In the digitally-driven BtoB marketplace, organizations are challenged to manage various initiatives and data collection across a wide array of solutions and technologies. This ultimately presents a potentially detrimental margin for error that marketers simply cannot afford to gamble with.
Progressive marketers realize the value of streamlining webinar and automation technologies, aligning disparate teams and initiatives and ultimately, optimizing prospect and customer interaction to fuel growth.
Webinars present a unique lead “goldmine” for marketers, as attendees are declaring their need for education and possibly, services. By understanding how to effectively provide the right offers and timely engagements to these prospects, marketers can bridge the gap between campaign efforts and closed business. Capturing accurate data on webinar attendees is crucial to measuring engagement, scoring leads and moving prospects through the pipeline.
About Citrix Online
Citrix Online provides secure, easy-to-use online solutions that enable people to work from anywhere with anyone: GoToAssist® and GoToManage® for remote support and IT management, GoToMeeting® for online meetings, GoToMyPC® for remote access, GoToTraining® for interactive online training and GoToWebinar® for larger web events. A division of Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the company is based in Santa Barbara, California.
About DemandGen Report
DemandGen Report (DGR) is a targeted e-media publication spotlighting the strategies and solutions that help Business-to- Business (BtoB) companies better align sales, marketing and disparate teams to support growth and drive revenue. DGR content and news coverage focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable companies to better measure and manage multichannel demand generation efforts. DemandGen Report is the only information source directly focused on this rapidly emerging business discipline.
