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Case study. Advantages of integrating BrightTalk with Hubspot

Written by Pasqual Flores | May 15, 2020 9:29:49 AM

As the marketing manager of a technology company dedicated to B2B services, do you manage the webinars? 

If you do, you will know that webinars are a great way to gain visibility, add value and stay in touch, both with your regular clients and new contacts interested in the subject matter.

It is also true that it is a complex task that requires a lot of effort on the part of the marketing team and all the actors involved. Therefore, we must ensure that we do so with maximum efficiency and return.

This time, we focus on the case study of an integration between BritghtTalk and Hubspot.

Next we will detail the following points:

History


As a marketing manager for a B2B technology services company, months ago you had opted for BrigthTalk as your platform to broadcast webinars.

One of the strengths was that BrigthTalk, in addition to offering you the professional platform for broadcasting webinars, left the webinar recorded in its database. This point was key, because it opened the door for you to obtain new qualified contacts to add to the corporate database.

These new contacts could reach the webinar, either because they were looking for webinars similar to yours, BrightTalk, or thanks to BrightTalk's marketing systems that recommended and recommend webinars that are more similar to the preferences of users ( as if it were a Netflix or a Youtube).

There were several points against, on the one hand you indicated to your corporate contacts that to access your fantastic webinar they had to register for BrightTalk. So, in terms of perception, you "pushed" them out of your corporate platform, and worse once they had registered in BrightTalk, since they entered their database, they began to receive "spam" from other webinars.

In addition, it should not be forgotten that the registration of your webinar attendees was happening on a platform external to your CRM, therefore this subsequently involved manual actions to centralize the data in the Hubspot CRM , with the consequent source of errors and duplication.

All of the above said, weighing pros and cons, the pros came out winning. Until one day ...,

Pain


It all started, as these themes usually do. With a sum of several factors, on the one hand your CEO asked you for a cost review and, on the other, you had already received some complaint from the webinar attendees to the post-registration receipt to BrightTalk of what they understood to be spam in their mailbox.

No problem, you as the head of digital marketing know that the digital world works like this. Go ten steps, drop a couple, correct three, and do another iteration. And that is how continuous improvement processes work.

Goal


So, without wasting time, you get down to business, aim:

  • Reduce costs
  • Avoid user complaints

Although you begin to intuit that perhaps the story does not end exactly as it seems, ...


Analysis


Following the good practices of digital marketing, before starting to act, check your opinion with another digital expert. In this case, you trust, as usual, with your Digital marketing agency.

The first step you work with your consultant is to put numbers:

  1. What does BrightTalk cost?
  2. How many new contacts has the platform brought you so far?
  3. How much time do you consume the manual actions necessary to transfer the data to your CRM Hubspot?
  4. How many complaints have you had?

Putting numbers always helps you to run away from perceptions, and helps to make the scenario to be solved tangible and objective.

A little, what you see is:

1. How much does BrightTalk cost?


You have a basic BrightTalk package that costs around € 350 / month. The quarter costs you € 1,050.

2. How many new contacts has the platform brought you so far?


From the last three webinars you have obtained an average of 21.5 new good quality contacts.

After going through your Marketing Funnels, you can expect that at least 1% will end up becoming a customer, so every three months you can end up converting two customers.

To a 75k average ticket that has your technology services company.
Then take it easy, you will add the cost of BrightTalk to the CAC and you will check if you maintain a good ratio of LTV:CAC. Still, you already begin to glimpse that the numbers are not going so badly for you.

3. How much time do you consume the manual actions necessary to transfer the data to your CRM Hubspot?


This data costs you a little more to get. There are different people involved, for starters, you yourself make the request, your technician does the BrightTalk export and then imports it to CRM Hubspot, and you finally go back to check that the data is consistent.

Ideally you would have self-recorded the time spent on this specific task, but you haven't.

You agree to the following:

  • On the one hand, be practical, you make a rough estimate, and you decide that between the two of you dedicate 4 hours to this task by webinar.
  • Second, you know that the way to gain efficiency is to measure and automate. So, you proceed to your corporate time allocation tool (Billage) to include a tag "Manual tasks capable of being automated", in this way from now on you will identify, not only this but other tasks that it can automate. This allows you to spend more time on your valuable work, in your case analyzing and making decisions, and not so much on administrative tasks.

4. How many complaints have you had?


Actually, at the moment, you have only received two complaints, but you know from experience that not everyone complains. So you thank the users who have bothered to find out how they were living their experience, and communicate that it is already working that, as soon as it is resolved, you will communicate them, and encourages them to continue reporting any other action they may do. to improve the user experience.

Action plan


Now that you have a clear photo, it is time to take action. On a sheet, rewrite the initial goals:

  1. Cost reduction
  2. User complaints
  3. Extra bonus

Now for each objective you write the actions that you agree to execute.

1. Cost reduction


After reviewing the CAC and the current ratio of LTV:CAC you decide to keep the investment in BrightTalk. Be on the right track.

2. Resolution of user complaints


At this point, you give a complete turn to the situation, so proceed to integrate BrightTalk within your corporate page so that the user always perceives that it is within your corporate space , you don't realize you are using BrightTalk.

So suddenly, you earn the following relevant points:

  • Perception. The user perceives that he is within his corporate space at all times. From the moment you register on the corporate website to the emails you receive, everything controlled by you.
  • Elimination "spam". This allows you to parameterize the user registration so that it no longer accepts receiving advertising from other webinars. In this way you root out complaints about it.

Final result


At the time of writing this article, you have been with the new scenario for two months, and the evaluation is highly positive.

No, you have only managed to control costs, you have managed to improve user perception and you have eliminated their complaints, but you have also managed to:

  • Receiving new contacts. As the webinar continues to be advertised on the BrightTalk platform, and thanks to its marketing processes in this regard, we continue to receive new contacts.
  • Automation. Thanks to having integrated BrightTalk and Hubspot, you have:
    • Earned at least 4 hours each month (more than one annual work week).
    • Eliminated the usual errors and duplications, which happen when you export and import manually, with all the wear and tear that this entails.
    • You have also automated actions that BrightTalk used to do, such as an email to the user once they have registered, or the usual reminder email a day or an hour before. Now everything under your control and with your corporate image.
  • Tracking. Since now everything happens within your corporate environment, you have all the tracing of the user in Hubspot since they register in the webinar if they attend, or see it asynchronously; and even your behavior on your website and the interaction with it.
  • Reporting. Thanks to automation, you have now been able to spend time creating a Tracking Dashboard in Hubspot, you no longer spend time exporting / importing and correcting errors, you spend time analyzing the information received to make better decisions.