So I bought a new 4k TV. Don’t ask me why. As a cord cutter it’s not like I have access to much or any 4k content but it was a great deal and I figured that I’d get some 4k content eventually.

I brought it home and it didn’t work with my wall mount. So, I went back to the store and found it really doesn’t work with any wall mounts that the store had in stock. After some further online research I found a number of work arounds and at the end of it all, my new TV is back in the box and my old TV is back on the wall.

All my fault really.

Marketers know all too well, the pains of using marketing tech that is not fully integrated into their stack. Manual work leads to poor adoption and overall reluctance to use those platforms that don’t integrate fully.

If you have read my last few posts you have seen all the data that points to webinars being on the rise and that the Marketing use-case is a huge driver of that growth.

And since you have read those blogs I can only assume you are a smart and well informed marketer! So why then do I so often encounter marketers who don’t have webinars integrated into their marketing ecosystem?

Integration drives efficiency

Most of our customers here at The Streaming Network start with integrating their marketing automation forms (we integrate with most commonly used marketing automation platforms and our competition is starting to follow suit). This integration allows them to automate the webinar communications in a campaign that can be easily copied. Promotional emails (invites) are sent from their marketing automation platform while our system handles the logistical emails such as confirmation and reminder emails. Since the two systems are integrated, both have access to all registrant data!

Now anytime that they have a new webinar to promote it is easy to copy the campaign, update the event specific information such the webinar event ID/url and copy and they are off to the races, all without manual intervention.

Need to get the viewership data back

It is one thing to know who registered and who viewed your webinars but today there are so many other data points that important and unlike much of your content marketing with webinars we know when people turn on and turn off and what they do while they are consuming your content. When your webinar platform is integrated with your marketing stack, you get all of this important data sent back to either your marketing automation platform or your CRM. This in turn allows you to trigger actions based on the appropriate next step in your marketing funnel. At The Streaming Network, we provide the sales force with access to all actions that a contact makes within a webinar so that they can follow up with prospects immediately following an event they have viewed. For customers who are not being actively engaged by sales and are in our drip category we trigger more actions in our marketing automation based on engagement level.

Get value out of your webinar recording

All the data points on on-demand webinars are growing. More viewers, longer average view times, and higher engagement. People like to get content when they want it and often when your webinar platform sits outside of your marketing stack marketers will opt to not gate on-demand webinar content or move the content to a different hosting platform where they can at least find out how many people click to view the webinar. This manual intervention and lack of engagement data will often mean that marketers will put less value on their on-demand webinars and like my 4K TV, not host the recording or not check the reports which results in missed opportunity.

Downstream publishing increases the value of your webinar program

The latest iteration in webinar integration allows marketers to assimilate directly with their social media channels tagging content, creating custom social images to display when content is shared and even publishing clips from webinars as bite sized content. Can you do this without the proper integration into your marketing stack? Sure you can, and many do, but once again the manual intervention required and lack of sufficient data to support the effort means that most will not take this step

If you are looking to get more ROI out of your current webinar program then integration may be the answer. It makes your life easier, provides you access to more data in the places you need it most and can help bolster your overall content strategy.

Now, anyone in the market for a near mint 4K TV? I know where you can get a deal!