Event Marketing with HubSpot: Efficient Event Management and Analysis

In one of my previous blogs I discussed how HubSpot offers a wide range of powerful tools that will allow you to plan, market, execute and report on your events. However, HubSpot has just stepped it up a notch by introducing their new Marketing Events tool to ensure we stay efficient, organised and data-driven.

HubSpot can now collect marketing events from certain integrations including Zoom, Eventbrite and GoToWebinar, this ensures you have an overview of all your marketing events in one central place. You simply need to add the marketing events object to your HubSpot Account, from there you can edit and analyse existing marketing events as well as create custom properties for your events.

Using Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise you can also associate marketing events with HubSpot campaigns to track the events performance as well as any assets used to promote your event such as landing page, email invites, website banners or forms.

Getting started

To add marketing events to your HubSpot Account follow these steps;

1. In your Account, go to Marketing > Events.
2. You will then see a box pop up that says “see all your marketing events in one place”, click add marketing event.
3. If you have not already connected Zoom, GoToWebinar or Eventbrite to your account, you will have the chance to connect it straight from the marketing event tool.
4. Once your external event platform is connected you will see all your events created via the app connected on one central dashboard.
   
   

Remember, like in HubSpots other tools you can edit the columns to display the most relevant information as well as create custom views to create unique dashboards personalised to your needs.

Sidenote: Should you not want your marketing event to sync with HubSpot you can simply delete the event from the events dashboard.

Marketing Events Dashboard

In your marketing events dashboard, click on the name of the event to see more details. In the left sidebar you will see all the information about the event, for example the link to the hosting platform, event status etc. From this left side bar you will also be able to view properties and their history. Now with marketing events being an object in HubSpot you will be able to create custom properties as well to store and collect data, as well as build custom reports later on.

The overview section will show you the total number of registrations, cancellations and attendees for your event. Below will be any assets associated with the event.

It is important to note that you can create custom event properties as well as customise the ‘create marketing event’ form in your settings by clicking on the ‘marketing events’ object.

Audience Segmentation

With the introduction of the marketing events object in HubSpot, you no longer need to create custom contact properties and manually update them to reflect whether or not your registrants actually attended your event or not.

For example, your event is now tracked in HubSpot and you would like to send out an email to everyone who has registered for your event 24hrs before the start time to ensure they do not miss the event. Simply navigate to lists, create an active list, add a filter and click ‘marketing events’, you will be able to segment by ‘registered for marketing event’ and add an ‘AND’ filter to narrow this down to one specific event, ie: webinar name from Zoom.

Custom Reporting

One of the most important aspects of any type of marketing is analysing and understanding the performance and engagement of your asset, event or campaign. Without analysis you will never be able to make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

You can now use the custom report builder to build your very own marketing event reports. Simply navigate to create a report, custom report and select marketing events, marketing events participation or marketing event analytics as your primary data source and start building.

Remember to add this report to its relevant dashboard and set up the sharing feature on your dashboard, this way you will automatically have your reports emailed to you or a team member on a certain date. This saves you time and effort each month, week or day by not having to log into HubSpot to pull your reports.

*Marketing Hub Enterprise ONLY - You can now track marketing events in your revenue attribution reports. In your settings, navigate to tracking & analytics > attribution and under the interaction types turn on ‘registered for a marketing event’ and ‘attended marketing event’.

Final Thoughts

As a digital strategist who plans and facilitates webinars every month, as well as a few in-person events, HubSpots new Marketing Events tool has easily become one of my favourite tools. I am now able to seamlessly integrate HubSpot with platforms like Zoom, track engagement, associate marketing assets with my event and build custom reports without having to manually update event data.

HubSpot’s Marketing Events has streamlined event management bringing everything into one central place, eliminating any frustrations from planning stages to executing and reporting on events.