Driving sales with webinar insights.

A single platform for webinars

Marketers have to balance many activities when nurturing leads, including product education, brand awareness, and industry insights. But for Nicole Rolek, Head of Demand Gen - Webinars, one of the biggest priorities is delivering seamless customer experiences. She leads a team focused on delivering webinars that get prospective customers excited about using Adobe solutions for their business.

Webinars are part of a lead generation program powered by Adobe Marketo Engage. The marketing automation platform connects marketing and sales teams with prospects worldwide. The custom implementation at Adobe, known as “MCZ” or “Marketo Customer Zero,” plays a vital role as an incubator in helping Adobe test the limits of Marketo Engage to deliver a better product and features for customers.

Several others on the Adobe team, including Spencer Ure, Senior Marketing Operations Manager – Global Marketing Platform Ops, work closely with marketing, demand generation, and campaign operations teams to understand what they need from MCZ and communicate their needs to product and engineering teams. Brian Shea, Senior Manager, AMER, Campaign Operations says, “It’s a win-win for us because we get direct input into how we can make Marketo Engage work better for us, which results in a better product for our customers.”

Shea and his team work closely with Rolek and her team to deliver approximately 20 webinars every quarter, from insightful thought leadership to discussions about specific solutions. The teams and many of their counterparts worldwide struggled with the limited integration between the marketing automation platform and the third-party webinar providers, which limited the types and amount of data they could collect.

After years of using On24, Adobe teams switched to the Interactive Webinars feature in Marketo Engage powered by Adobe Connect. This provides a single, integrated platform to develop and run webinars — a switch that streamlines webinar creation and eliminates the need to pay for a third-party solution.

“Having a single, integrated platform for webinars enables our teams to work together efficiently to build and execute webinars on demand,” says Ure. “We’re improving customer experiences and gaining richer data for insights and reporting.”

“A big benefit of using Interactive Webinars is that we have valuable insights at our fingertips. It's changing how sales teams interact with leads, which has helped us achieve attendee conversion rates up to 43%.”

Nicole Rolek

Head of Demand Gen – Webinars, Adobe

Using data to understand webinar attendance

The integration between webinars and the marketing automation platform gives Rolek a much clearer view of how prospects interact with webinars. Registration and attendance data are available immediately without needing to wait for reports from a third-party webinar provider. Rolek and her team can sort through data and pass along qualified leads within an hour.

The team also has access to more detailed data than ever, with the help of APIs that connect the webinar to the marketing automation platform. Rather than just telling a sales representative that a lead attended a webinar, the team can say that a particular lead attended for 43 minutes, answered two polls, and asked a question, giving sales a better starting point for a conversation.

“A big benefit to using Interactive Webinars is that we have valuable insights at our fingertips,” says Rolek. “It’s changing how sales teams interact with leads, which has helped us achieve attendee conversion rates up to 43%.”

Rolek and her team also use data to optimize content. If part of a webinar is particularly engaging, with a lot of participants staying to watch and ask questions, the team might repurpose that section for future webinars. They also might make the clip available online and promote it across channels, or simply make sure that sales knows about topics that are of main interest for prospects.

“We can build out webinars in advance and make sure that everything is running smoothly so our webinar attendees receive a smoother and more polished webinar experience.”

Brian Shea

Senior Manager, AMER Campaign Operations, Adobe

Accelerating content creation

The campaign operations team dramatically streamlined webinar creation by taking advantage of reusable and customizable campaigns, templates, layouts, and pods in Interactive Webinars. After Rolek’s team finalizes requirements for a webinar, Shea and his team use the information to build out the program. They can clone an existing program to quickly set up email invites, follow-up communications, landing pages, registration pages, and blank webinar rooms. This reduces the time to set up a program and delivers a more consistent experience.

As the operations team customizes the program, Rolek’s team can prepare the room for the webinar by pulling in layout templates and adding pods for surveys, polls, Q&A, and other interactive spaces.

“Interactive Webinars streamlines program creation by allowing us to take advantage of templates and cloning to work quickly and build out programs,” says Shea. “We can build out webinars in advance and make sure that everything is running smoothly so our webinar attendees receive a smoother and more polished webinar experience.”

“What made this a successful migration for us was the collaboration across the Adobe team. We polished Interactive Webinars into a feature that Adobe teams love — and one that customers can benefit from as well.”

Spencer Ure

Senior Marketing Operations Manager – Global Marketing Platform Ops, Adobe

Working together towards a gold-standard solution

The move to Interactive Webinars took a collaborative effort from marketing, operations, product, and engineering teams. Teams underwent training to ensure they would be prepared to make the switch and deliver engaging webinars quickly.

“When changing to any new product, there’s an educational element that customers shouldn’t ignore. But since Interactive Webinars is part of Marketo Engage, a solution already familiar to our teams, the global rollout went more smoothly,” says Ure. “What made this a successful migration for us was the collaboration across the Adobe team. We polished Interactive Webinars into a feature that Adobe teams love — and one that customers can benefit from as well.”