Overview
Ever since the craziness of 2020, virtual meeting services have become more important than ever for companies to utilize in order to reach their customers and prospects. It allows for people to learn about your product, best practices or hear from existing customers their learnings from using your product all while not having to leave their couch or office chair. You can even use it to simulcast live events as well so those that are unable to travel can still attend your sessions! As this technology continues to grow and mature, it is imperative that it integrates with your marketing automation platform to help create a seamless experience for your registrants. With that in mind, here are the top 3 virtual meeting services that offer great integration services with your existing marketing automation platform.
Zoom
Zoom has almost become a verb when it comes to virtual meetings at this point. And thankfully, they have integrations with all of the top marketing automation platforms such as Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot and Eloqua. This allows you to track registrants, allow you to use branded landing pages and forms and create a seamless post-event experience with the ability to get attendee data in minutes to start sending post-event follow ups.
At the same time, if using branded landing pages and forms might be a step too far for you at this time, Zoom is also able to host pages and signup forms as well. This provides flexibility when needed and allows you to host webinars or virtual events in minutes.
The final added benefit of integrating this service to your marketing automation platform is the ability to have Zoom custom fields sync over. This will allow you to capture additional registration data, chat transcripts (such as questions asked during a webinar) and any poll/survey they might engage with.
On24
Like Zoom, On24 has direct integrations with all of the major platforms (Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, etc.). You also get the same capabilities in terms of using branded landing pages or templated On24 specific pages. On24 also allows data from the platform to be mapped to custom fields to allow you to capture chat/questions, survey results and any custom questions you might ask on your On24 hosted form if you choose to go that route.
It should be noted that some big changes happened to the On24/Marketo integration in early 2023. You can view these updates here to learn more.
GoToWebinar
Like the others before it, GoToWebinar has integrations with Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua and Pardot. The major difference between this tool and the others is that the platform is for webinars specifically. They have another offering, GoToMeeting, to handle virtual meeting capabilities. But outside of that one difference, the platform has similar integration capabilities in terms of registration page hosting, allowing custom data to be added to your marketing automation platform and allows seamless integration services to track registrants as well as day of attendees and no-shows to eliminate any manual list work post-event.
When should a company integrate their Virtual Meeting service with their Marketing Automation Platform?
Once you have an established process for webinar/virtual event creation, you should utilize the integration service as well. This will cut out some of the common hassles such as list imports, manual updates to campaigns and more.
Who should own the Virtual Meeting service?
This one can be tricky depending on your company structure. But most of the time, a virtual meeting platform should be owned by your IT team to ensure it is always up to privacy and company regulations. For the integration itself, that piece can be owned by the Marketing Operations team as long as the IT team allows you access to the tool and a marketing alias account to create webinars and virtual events.
Conclusion
In terms of integration services for virtual meetings, you can’t go wrong with any of these three choices. What really matters in the long run is what tool works best for your company in terms of their capabilities for hosting meetings, webinars and event simulcasts (if that’s of interest). It’s a good feeling to know no matter what the choice, you will have the ability to utilize any of these within your marketing automation platform and gain additional insight and value to your organization.
