Overview
Marketo’s Interactive Webinar feature is a comprehensive tool designed to streamline and enhance webinar marketing efforts. It allows marketers the ability to manage the creation of a webinar campaign end to end without having to purchase an additional 3rd party webinar platform. This is all taken care of within Marketo!
What is the Marketo Interactive Webinar feature?
It’s essentially Marketo’s own webinar platform. This feature allows you to host webinars while also managing the end to end logistics involved all within the Marketo instance. This includes setting up registration, providing webinar access for speakers and admins and reporting on webinar metrics. To learn more about how to create an Interactive Webinar within Marketo, this overview runs through the steps.
This feature will also allow you to manage all aspects of your webinar within the webinar event program in Marketo. This way everything from the invite list to post-event reporting can all be found and stored in one place in your Marketo instance.
Why should companies use the Interactive Webinar feature?
Streamlining processes and consolidation of tech are two very common reasons to use the Interactive Webinar feature. Being able to have your webinar service directly integrated within your marketing automation platform can help decrease your tech bloat while also keeping it within one of your currently owned systems.
Being able to manage all aspects of your webinar within one tool can help streamline your webinar build process. You will no longer have to set up different aspects of your webinar in multiple places, it will all live within your Marketo instance.
When should a company look to use the Interactive Webinar feature?
Before jumping into the new webinar feature, you should evaluate whether or not this tool is right for your organization. If you are currently happy with your webinar provider and process, it may make sense to just test this out as a future consideration. This feature is also fairly new, so it may make sense to hold off on switching over until your current webinar solution is no longer suitable for your organization’s needs.
However, if you are currently having issues with your webinar platform and webinar processes or setup, this tool could help close those gaps. For more information and some FAQs around the product, this overview from Marketo can be helpful to learn more.
Who and how should you implement Interactive Webinars at your company?
This will be a team effort with your Operations and Marketing teams in order to successfully move your webinar process into Marketo. To start, outline your current processes and where/who is managing and executing these actions? This can give you a sense as to what you will need to copy over to your Marketo instance as well as manage who will need access (and access level). Thankfully, Marketo has an overview on the various access levels you can provide team members with this feature.
Before launching any live webinars, make sure to spin up a test webinar to see if your template and outline you created covers all aspects of your webinar process in the new system. You can also test the functionality of the webinar platform itself such as polling, sharing screens, questions and answers and anything else that might be of importance for your webinars.
Once fully vetted and tested, be sure to document the process and have all team members involved highlight their scope of work within the processes. This can help make sure if any team member is on PTO or leaves the company, you can have someone fill in and be able to handle any tasks they may not currently know how to do.
Conclusion
While this feature is still in its early stages, the Marketo Interactive Webinar feature does show some promise of providing an all in one webinar platform that might tailor to your organization’s needs. It provides an all-in-one solution for your webinar programs and allows you to have one less piece of technology in your stack, which for anyone managing marketing technology, is always worth looking into.
