How to Use HubSpot Marketing Events for Webinars

HubSpot recently made a big upgrade to Marketing Events. Before, it was only useful in a few use cases. And probably not for you. Today, thanks to the upgrades, HubSpot Marketing Events have become incredibly powerful for marketers who run events and webinars.

Ryan's webinar post went viral

Together with Ryan Gunn from Attribution Academy we hosted a webinar on all the ins and outs about the updated Marketing Events to discuss:

Watch the full session here:

Follow this step-by-step guide (which we probably should have made a paid course, it's so good!) and learn how you can start using Marketing Events for your company. Whether it's simply building lists from your events and webinars, reporting dashboards, or things like lead scoring – we'll walk you through it and explain it in this guide.

What are HubSpot Marketing Events?

Let's start with the basics. Or skip ahead if you're already familiar. HubSpot marketing events are a CRM object used to track and manage data from both online and offline events, such as webinars, conferences, and product launches. This feature allows you to associate contacts with specific events, view registration and attendance details on their contact records, and analyze your event performance all in one place.

You can create events manually or connect apps to automate data import and track attendees and no-shows.

Before the big update in October, marketing events were somewhat hidden within HubSpot. They were tucked away in a less accessible part of the platform, which led to many users overlooking their potential.

At the start, the functionality was limited primarily to Zoom webinars, which restricted the scope of data that could be captured and utilized. Now it's available to any integration that supports Marketing Events like Contrast.

What has changed since HubSpot updated Marketing Events:

Why this matters:

New use cases thanks to Marketing Events

This guide will teach you how to create a dashboard like this

Now that you know what has been updated – and why this is useful to you, let's look at how you can start using Marketing Events for your events and webinars.

Is Your Webinar Platform the Right Fit?

Your webinar platform matters. You knew this. So you did your homework when you bought your current platform.

But did you have time to dive into the nitty gritty details when you're purchasing your webinar platform? Probably not. You start using it, and then find out that you were overpromised – and you guess it, the webinar platform and its integration are underdelivering.

So let's put out a few red flags that you can pay attention to when purchasing a new webinar platform. Or perhaps, evaluate your current platform on.

If you want to have a webinar platform with a plug-and-play native HubSpot integration – you should check out Contrast. It's the #1 webinar platform rated and fastest growing HubSpot integration on the marketplace.

Now, let's get into the guide.

Automate follow-up based on attendee behavior

You can't expect everyone in your webinar to book a demo right after it's over. That means, your follow-up needs to be strong so that you can turn all those attendees into demos booked.

Doing this manually is a crime. Unless you had 6 signups of course. Let's look at how we can automate our follow-up simply based on how they have interacted with your webinars.

Step 1: start by defining your key triggers

Determine which attendee actions should trigger workflows. Common triggers include event registration, attendance, poll responses, and specific engagement levels (e.g., attending more than 50% of the event).

Perhaps you're getting so many registrations that you don't even care about them. In that case, you'll likely only focus on live viewers. Getting so many live viewers that even sorting these out is difficult? Focus on the ones that watched 80% of the webinar or more.

Step 2: Let's setup workflows in HubSpot

Prioritize leads based on engagement

You can use HubSpot's Lead Scoring feature to spot highly engaged prospects. Especially for companies that already have a webinar strategy in place, this is one of the easiest low effort things you can do to filter out the signal from the noise.

Basic Lead Scoring with Registration and Attendance

Let's start with the absolute minimum. Score leads based when they register to a webinar and attend one. These are called your scoring criteria. We'll later expand on more advanced use cases – for now we keep it simple.

In HubSpot, open "Lead Scoring". Now select Contact Engagement Score and click on Create (top right).

Lead scoring > Content Engagement Score

This panel will open in where you can set up your Lead Scoring logic. At the bottom you'll find "Add event criteria". Now search for "Marketing Event" by typing in the search field.

Add Marketing Event to start using them

Now let's set up the basic criteria for counting points for every time a contact registers to an event or webinar. In the dropdown field, look for "Registered for marketing event". Set the event name to be known so we're sure it only add points to people who actually attended an event.

Attribute 5 points to people who register to an event

Now attribute a number of points for every time a contact registers. In this example we have chosen 5 points. It's up to you to select the number of points that make sense for your business and event strategy.

It goes without saying that we care more about people who attend our events – than people who just register. So let's set up the scoring in a way that reflects this. We follow the same steps as before. The only thing that is different is the number of points we allocate for attendance. In our example we choose 15.

Attribute 15 points to people who attend an event

Things are starting to take shape. We now score leads if they:

  1. Register to one of our events or webinars [5 points]
  2. Attend to one of our events or webinars [15 points]

In case it's possible for registrants to cancel their participation to your event or webinar, we should also take this into account. Use the "Canceled marketing event registration" event for this. Now follow the same steps as before – but subtract(!) 15 points in case this happens.

Your Lead Scoring setup should look like this. Of course with different scores, if you have set them up in that way.

Subtract 15 points to people who cancel their attendance

Advanced Lead Scoring with engagement data

If we critically look at our events and webinars, we care more about signals like did they watch live, or on replay. Did they answer polls. Or did they ask a questions? For most companies, these are the true high-intent signals – and so we should score them higher!

Let's look at how it's setup. In this walkthrough we're going to use Contrast webinars. If you're not using Contrast, you might have different events available – or some might be missing completely. If these are important to you: you know what to do ;-)

Click on "Add more events" and search for "Integration Events". A list of events will open that are connected to connected integrations. Scroll down to you find Contrast, or the webinar platform you're using.

Advanced scoring by introducing Contrast specific data

A list of events will open that are connected to connected integrations. Scroll down to you find Contrast, or the webinar platform you're using.

How to add webinar registration as a marketing event criteria on HubSpot

Before we said that a live view is more important than a registration. Fair. But just a live view doesn't say much. What if they dropped in the first 5 min of the webinar? Let's zoom in on the people who actually watched the webinar. We can do this by using the Webinar Live View and using the Live Completion Rate.

Get more narrow by using live completion rates

In this example, we award 25 points to a person who has watched more than 50% of the webinar. Of course you can set the criteria whichever way you want. Don't forget to set one up for a replay view as well.

Tip: people who watch the entire webinar are very high-intent prospects. There is less engagement during a replay, and thus, we would, for our case, qualify them as less important.

Now let's look at engagement. You're running polls. Right? Please tell me you do. How do we turn those polls into signals your sales team can use to improve their follow up? Easy.

In this example, we award 35 points towards someone who answered a poll. That is what the Poll answer is known refers to. There's a chance your webinar platform doesn't send this data over to HubSpot. So please check that.

We love poll answers: so let's score them high!

Perhaps you're interested in a specific poll answer. For example, in most of our webinars we ask what CRM people use. As Contrast is built for HubSpot – the best answer for us is obviously HubSpot. Let's look at how to set this up.

We're still looking at poll votes in combination with poll answer. This time, we set the filter to contains any of. Now we type in the poll answer we want to score for: "HubSpot". In this example, we're awarding 50 points for any contact that answers this during any webinar.

A poll answer that fits our ICP? Score!

If you want to make this specific to a single webinar, you can. In the same block where you have set up the logic for your poll, add a filter option based on the access link of your webinar:

This flow only scores people who watched a specific webinar and answered HubSpot

You can now preview the distribution and see out of all your contacts in HubSpot, how they would score. In our example down below, there are a lot of people who score very high. This is because we have forgotten one thing: time.

Preview of how our setup will affect lead scoring

By adding a timeframe to our lead scoring setup we for example can only look at people who had activity in the last year. You want to play with this set up so that the right amount of warm leads come to the surface. Don't be afraid to adjust it over time – it's normal.

Scope it down to last year

Another way to dampen the blow of time is to use decay. Implementing a time decay factor can ensure that more recent activities are weighted more heavily than older ones. For example, you might reduce the score contribution of an event by 50% each month to prioritize recent engagement.

How to organize your lead scoring at an organizational level

You can of course create all of this in isolation. However, it becomes real powerful when you start combining it with other data. Lead scoring can be further refined by combining Contrast data with other behavioral data, such as page views or e-book downloads. For example, visiting a pricing page might add more points to a lead's score, indicating a higher level of interest.

How to use the lead scoring I have just set up?

If this is your first time having touched lead scoring in HubSpot – you're probably thinking "okay, now what?". If you already have experience, then feel free to skip ahead to the next section.

Lead scores are a powerful tool to prioritize leads. There are many different use cases for lead scores. But let's start with where you can view it. Your lead score appears as “HubSpot Score” on contacts; use it in views, lists, workflows, routing, and reports.

Where it shows:

How to use it in practice

Visibility and prioritization:

  1. Qualification and lifecycle
    • Create a workflow: If HubSpot Score ≥ 50, set Lifecycle Stage to MQL, assign owner, and create a follow-up task.
    • Add an internal notification when a contact crosses a threshold (e.g., 75) to alert Sales.
  2. Routing and SLAs
    • Rotate leads to specific owners when the score is high, or send lower-score leads to nurture.
    • Use score tiers (e.g., 0–24, 25–49, 50–74, 75+) to define SLA response times and playbooks.
  3. Nurture and campaigns
    • Build active lists based on score to tailor email sequences and ad audiences (e.g., “Score 25–49: consideration content,” “≥75: BOFU demo offer”).
    • Sync high-score lists to ads (Google/LinkedIn) for retargeting.
  4. Reporting and feedback loops
    • Dashboard widgets: score distribution, meetings created vs. score, win rate vs. score.
    • Review which scoring rules correlate with conversions; adjust weights to improve signal.

Common patterns that work

Wait, I can't find my lead score???

Alright, just do this:

Retargeting based on attendance and engagement

Routing leads based on poll responses is a strategic way to ensure that your sales and marketing teams engage with prospects in a personalized way. But perhaps you don't have time to follow up with every attendee in a personalized way – and you've been thinking about how to use the HubSpot prospecting agent for outreach to less engaged contacts?

Set ICP to marketing contacts

Start by creating a new workflow. As the trigger you "Webinar Live View" has been completed.

Now within your workflow we're going to create a branch. We do. this with the AND/OR logic so that for example we can filter in ICP based on different criteria – such as: Did they watch a webinar? How long? And what industry are they in (based on poll result)?

Lead routing based on industry

  1. Set Up Workflows for Lead Routing:
    • Navigate to the "Workflows" section in HubSpot and create a new workflow.
    • Choose "Contact-based" workflow to start.
  2. Define Enrollment Triggers:
    • Set the enrollment triggers based on the poll responses. For example, if you have a poll question about industry, use the response to trigger the workflow.
  3. Branch the Workflow Based on Poll Responses:
    • Use "If/Then" branches to segment contacts based on their poll responses.
    • For each branch, define the criteria based on the poll response.
  4. Assign Leads to the Appropriate Teams:
    • Within each branch, use the "Rotate leads" action to assign the contact to the appropriate sales team or representative.
    • Ensure that each team or representative is set up in HubSpot and available for lead assignment.
  5. Notify the Sales Team:
    • Add an action to send an internal notification to the assigned sales representative or team. This can be an email or a Slack notification.

Fully automated retargeting with Ai based on engagement

Now let's set up the actions. For our "Manual reach out" branch we can use the rotate contact owners action and set up the configuration. Now the contact owner will get a notification the minute somebody needs manual outreach.

For the people who answered a poll but didn't watch the webinar in its entirety, we still want to reach out – but because of our limited sales team do this using the Ai prospecting agent (this requires you to have set up Prospecting Agent ahead of time") from HubSpot.

And for the people who weren't engaged, we simply enrol them in an email nurture campaign.

How to Create a Webinar Influenced Dashboard in HubSpot

Start by creating a new report, a custom report in this case. Our primary data source are contacts. Allow more data sources by toggling the option. Now read the following block and follow the exact sequence:

1. Contacts (primary data source) 2. Marketing event participations 3. Marketing events 4. Deals

View Revenue per Webinar using Marketing Events

Now let's set the filters. Filter in "Is closed won" from Deals in. Set it to True.

View how webinars influence different deal stages

By filtering in Deal Stage (from "Deals") you can now split this data up by their deal stage. Don't forget to filter out "Closed Won".

View monthly registrations with Marketing Events

This one is pretty simple. Follow the exact same steps as before by starting with contacts as the primary data source and ending with deals.

Attendance split

Check out how many of your registrants actually show up to your events and webinars by creating this attendance split. It's smart to track this over time so you understand whether your event strategy is still resonating with your audience.

Notify contact owners about engagement on Slack or Teams

You can use webinar engagement like live attendance, or replay views to notify the contact owner on Slack or Teams a message.

Notify Contact owner about webinar views

Now as the trigger, we search for our webinar platform. In this case, it's of course Contrast. Now you'll see the available triggers that you can use.

Notify Contact owner about poll answers

We can do the exact same with more rich engagement info such as poll answers. At Contrast, we usually ask people "What's your CRM?" to qualify our audience.

How to use Webinar and Event Data to Personalize Outreach

Sales people want one thing and that's to close leads as fast as possible. They don't have time to dig in 69 different lists with attendees, poll answers etc.. Nor do YOU have the time to help them dig up this data.

Contrast Engagement Timeline

Engagement Timeline is a card on top of a contact that shows all of their engagement during every webinar on Contrast:

How Webinar Data Personalizes Prospect Messaging

Use the signals they gave you. Keep messages short. Deliver one useful asset. Offer one next step.