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

Alright. 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 the 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.

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 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

Advanced Lead Scoring with engagement data

What we showed in the basics is possible with almost every webinar platform. As the title suggested: it's rather basic.

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 intend 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 ;-)

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.

Fully automated retargeting with Ai based on engagement

When set up correctly webinars can help automate aspects of your outreach processes, allowing for better engagement with leads.

Advanced use cases

The two examples before give you a good idea of how to use webinar data in workflows using branches and different actions coupled to them. Now that you master this, it's time to explore some advanced use cases.

Lead capture and enrichment

Use Webinar registrations to create/associate contacts, stamp webinar metadata (topic, date, source, UTMs), and enrich interests. Branch immediately on firmographic fit (ICP tiers, industry, company size) plus intent signals from CTA clicks and poll votes.

Sales handoff playbooks

Convert intent into immediate sales actions by automating workflows based on live/replay views and CTA clicks or poll responses.

Precision nurture and content routing

Let behaviors choose the next touch automatically based on prior engagement metrics and preferences.

ABM and account-level orchestration

Aggregate engagement at the company level to enable personalized outreach for multiple stakeholders within target accounts.

Customer and expansion plays

Align survey results with follow-up actions tailored for existing customers to encourage upsell opportunities based on engagement.

Reporting and ROI loops

Utilize data from various sources to create comprehensive reporting dashboards for analyzing revenue influenced by webinars.

How to Create a Webinar Influenced Dashboard in HubSpot

To accurately measure the effects of your webinars on revenue and sales performance, create a custom dashboard with relevant participation metrics.

  1. Start with contacts as the primary data source.

  2. Incorporate marketing event participations, and then attach deals.

  3. Configure filters to track only successful conversions (closed won deals) influenced by specific webinars.

Utilizing these methods will provide clear insights into how webinars are performing and influence business dynamics.

Conclusion

With Marketing Events, leveraging event data within HubSpot has never been simpler. From analyzing participation metrics to employing complex workflows, the capabilities enable marketers to fine-tune their strategies effectively.