If you are not familiar with HubSpot’s Marketing Events feature, you could be forgiven. For years they hid it in the UI so it was only accessible if you knew where to look. And I have to think that was intentional, because it was kind of useless. But, Marketing Events recently got a glow up!
Marketing events data in the workflow builder
You can now use Marketing Events data in lists, reports, and workflows. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities in terms of actioning your event data. You can segment based on registration or attendance status, try to recapute cancelled registrations, and even target based on how long someone spent watching your event.
The key here is that, for the most part, you’re going to want to use a webinar app integration to populate that data. Popular webinar platforms like Zoom, On24, or my personal favorite, Contrast, sync data directly into the Marketing events object.
Last November, I joined Contrast’s Maxim Poulsen for a webinar in which we covered how to use the upgraded Marketing Events object to track your webinars, segment your audience, and build a world-class lead routing engine.
That webinar was, in no small terms, a hit. We had over 800 registrations with over 500 views of the webinar across live and on-demand versions. And we now know, thanks to some attribution reporting we built together, that the webinar drove €45,000 in ARR for their webinar platform.
By popular demand, we are coming back with a Part 2, focused on how to take your event data to the next level using App Events! This week’s newsletter is a recap of the first webinar in preparation for the next one, which takes place April 2nd at 11am ET.
The Problem with Traditional Event Tracking
Webinars and live events are only becoming more important. They educate your audience, build trust, and establish your company's authority. And, in the era of AI diluting the personality out of marketing content, events are one of the few ways you can form authentic human connections with potential customers.
But historically, tracking their actual impact in HubSpot has been a bit of a nightmare, fraught with manual processes and missed opportunities for engagement and follow up.
This is how most companies are doing it:
You host an event on Zoom or another platform. When it's over, you export a CSV file of the registrants and attendees. You then manually import that list into HubSpot, add them to a static list like "Attended Q3 Webinar," and blindly send them all the exact same follow-up email.
This approach is flawed for several reasons.
First, manual imports are a recipe for bad data. If your spreadsheet isn't perfectly mapped, you risk creating duplicate contacts. And as we've discussed before, duplicate records quietly sabotage your go-to-market efforts. When a sales rep diligently follows up with a promising lead, only to discover that a marketing colleague just sent that same person a completely different, top-of-funnel email, you have a major alignment problem.
Second, a static list tells you nothing about intent. A traditional import treats the person who registered but didn't attend exactly the same as the person who stayed for the entire 60-minute presentation and asked three questions.
With that process, you are certainly not building dashboards like this to show the impact of your webinar program:
This dashboard was built using Marketing Events data
Enter the HubSpot Marketing Events Object
HubSpot marketing events are a CRM object used to track and manage data from both online and offline events, such as webinars, conferences, and product launches.
This feature allows you to:
Associate contacts with specific events directly in the CRM.
View registration, attendance, and duration details on their contact records.
Analyze your overall event performance all in one centralized place.
Instead of relying on static lists, you can create these events manually, or better yet, connect integration apps to automate your data imports and flawlessly track attendees and no-shows.
When you use a dedicated webinar platform that integrates directly with the Marketing Events object, the data syncs automatically. It logs the event timeline activity right on the contact record. This gives your sales and marketing teams immediate, rich context without ever having to touch a CSV file.
Once you have the data, you can leverage it in automation and reporting to action that data so a webinar lead never falls through the cracks and all resulting revenue is attributable to marketing.
Let’s take a look at a couple key use cases for marketing events data:
Automating Follow-Up Based on Behavior
Route webinar leads based on self-selected polling responses
You can't expect every single webinar attendee to book a demo the second the event ends. Your follow-up after an event is where relationships are built or broken.
So you want to start by segmenting based on behavioral data you captured during the webinar. Here are some data points to consider:
Registration vs. Attendance: Don’t ignore the people who registered but didn't show up, but don’t put a ton of time and resources into personalization. Live attendance is a much stronger signal of intent.
Attendance Duration: An attended who only saw 10% of the webinar is not as engaged as someone who watched 95%. Route low engagers to an automated follow up while saving sales attention for high engagers.
Polling Responses: You can using polling questions in your webinar to gather additional information on your attendees. Ask about what role or industry they are in and personalize your follow ups to match the response options.
Scoring Leads based on Event Attendance Status
With the upgraded Marketing Events object, you can score leads based on actual behavior and engagement rather than just form fills. Because the event data syncs directly to the CRM, you can use Marketing Event properties as filters in your HubSpot Lead Scoring model.
Here is one way to set it up:
The Baseline: Give a small point bump (+5 points) just for registering.
The Attendance Bump: Add a solid chunk of points (+10 points) if the contact's event status changes to "Attended."
The Intent Multiplier: This is the game-changer. Use the "Attendance Duration" or "Attendance Percentage" property. If a prospect stays for more than 80% of your 45-minute webinar, that’s incredibly high intent. Give them a big bump (+20 points).
Poll & Q&A Responses: If your webinar platform integration passes poll data to HubSpot, score based on their specific answers. If they answered "Yes" to a poll asking if they are evaluating new software this quarter, that should immediately push them over your MQL threshold.
The No-Show Penalty: You can even use negative attributes. Deduct points (-5 points) if their status updates to "Cancelled" or "No Show." This ensures your sales team's lead views aren't getting cluttered with unengaged prospects.
Advanced Use Cases & Event Attribution
Want to go deeper on how you can action and report on event data? For that you’re going to want to go beyond Marketing Events and start using App Events, which webinar integrations like Contrast push into HubSpot as timeline activities on the Contact record.
Join me and Maggie Philbin, Senior Product Manager for App Events for a session exploring how to use this activity data to segment, automate, and report on your events.
This newsletter was sponsored by Contrast. Interested in partnering with Hubsessed? Visit our Sponsorships page for more info!