The Challenge
Our existing webinar program was very popular and growing rapidly, and expanding to cover new topics and products. We were running our webinars in Eloqua, but using a very manual process with no integration with our website or our webinar provider. Without automation the program was not scalable or even sustainable. In order to grow our webinar program, we needed an improved event management process that would better meet our prospects needs and increase the efficiency of webinar deployment and follow-up.
Goals
Our goals were to promote our webinar program as its own brand, to appeal to a larger audience, and promote our webinars as the premier educational resource for our vertical markets. The objectives were to create brand loyalty for the webinar program itself, to increase prospect and trade association engagement, and of course ultimately produce more sales opportunities.
Benchmarking
We were already running our webinars using Eloqua, so it was easy to document the current state of the program – we measured the number of webinars we were presenting, the number of registrants and attendees, the number of qualified leads generated and the closed-won business associated with those leads.
The program
We built a new website using the MODX content management system (CMS) and integrated it deeply with Eloqua and Citrix GoToWebinar using the API. We made numerous improvements to our webinar process, including:
- Created new branding and design for the new website, including a revamp of all email communications, landing pages etc.
- Developed a custom event management system for the CMS, to streamline webinar promotion by using a custom database and interface specifically tailored to our needs.
- Established an affiliate referral program, allowing us to track prospects referred to us by industry trade associations and pay the associations for referrals.
- Introduced of state-specific, topically focused webinars that have been particularly effective in lead generation.
- Refined our Eloqua webinar campaign process, using customized features of our CMS to facilitate landing page and email design and streamline our registration process. We used our CMS to create auto-generated, self-hosted landing pages with Eloqua registration forms, as well as auto-generated email templates and followup pages.
- Integrated Eloqua with our CMS using custom-built cloud connectors to share event and registration data. This allows us to display personalized webinar registration and attendance records to our prospects by providing them with a login to the website.
- Integrated CMS with Citrix GoToWebinar using clout connectors and the GoToWebinar API for automatic webinar registration and post-webinar attendance, polling data and followup.
![interface.jpg]()
Custom Cloud Connector interface
Deployment Process
From the perspective of the marketing user, the webinar deployment process is simple:
- Create the webinar in GoToWebinar
- Duplicate the last webinar campaign in Eloqua
- Change segments and dates within the campaign as appropriate.
- Copy/paste the invitation email from the CMS into a new Eloqua email
- Configure the MODX CMS cloud connectors – enter the webinar data into the first connector, and simply select the appropriate webinar from a drop-down for the other connector
- After the webinar, upload the recording to Vimeo and enter the Vimeo video id into the CMS
Resources
In developing this program we used material from all of the “Fundamentals” series classes as well as material from Basic Event Management, Events in the Cloud, Progressive Profiling, and System Integration. However, since the project involved a lot of custom development and going beyond the material covered in those courses, we also made extensive use of the Topliners community, particularly the Code It forum and the API development guides. In particular, Fred Sakr’s PHP class library for interfacing with the Eloqua API was incredibly useful.
Impact
Overall, this webinar program has been our most successful marketing initiative across a broad range of metrics, from high-level brand impact all the way through closed-won business. The primary impact of this project in particular was to improve our efficiency. With this system, webinars were much easier to manage and we were able to immediately double, and eventually triple our rate of webinar presentation, expanding to cover other product lines and topics.
This resulted in significant increases in both the total number of webinar registrants, and the number of registrants per webinar, as shown below, as well as a significant increase in closed-won opportunities attributed to webinars.
![registrations.jpg]()
Webinar Registrations
![registrations-per-webinar.jpg]()
Registrations per Webinar
In addition, the program had a number of ancillary benefits, such as increasing traffic and link juice inbound to our website, and creating buzz within the industry and in social media. The program was nominated for a Markie award and won a Gold Key award from the BMA.
