Citrix GoToWebinar (with Marketo Sync)
November 14, 2014
Citrix GoToWebinar (with Marketo Sync)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GoToWebinar
First, to be clear, my primary work with GoToWebinar is on the back end to sync our webinars to our marketing automation tool, in our case, Marketo. My experiences have been from this perspective, as well as being part of the test webinars and setup for those that we produce for marketing purposes.
As mentioned, our marketing team holds a series of supply industry-relevant webinars to help educate transportation and operations professionals in current issues facing the supply chain world. These webinars are held either with all panelists on-site or sometimes with panelists off-site as well. While our organization has many licenses for GoToMeeting, our webinar usage is confined to our marketing team.
We started hosting our own webinars in order to have better visibility into the kind of ROI it was providing. It cut our costs to run them on our own, and it helps us to see what topics are best for our existing customer base, as well as prospective ones.
As mentioned, our marketing team holds a series of supply industry-relevant webinars to help educate transportation and operations professionals in current issues facing the supply chain world. These webinars are held either with all panelists on-site or sometimes with panelists off-site as well. While our organization has many licenses for GoToMeeting, our webinar usage is confined to our marketing team.
We started hosting our own webinars in order to have better visibility into the kind of ROI it was providing. It cut our costs to run them on our own, and it helps us to see what topics are best for our existing customer base, as well as prospective ones.
Pros
- GoToWebinar syncs easily with Marketo from Marketo's Launch Point menu. They work fairly seamlessly with little hands-on work required. Since it was important for us to have visibility into what kind of growth we can get from running webinars, this has been the single greatest piece about using the platform. We are able to use Marketo's built-in analytic tools to determine the efficacy of our topics, our panelists, and running webinars in general.
- GoToWebinar is able to support a panelist-type webinar. Rather than one individual speaking to many, the ability to share presenter status and speaker status really help to incorporate more speakers. That includes the ability to have panelists off-site, although we have had less success with that.
- GoToWebinar helps us to track registrants and attendees by creating unique access to each individual registrant. Although we generally view this information in Marketo, GoTo has its own lists that we are able to export and compare if we ever need it.
- Their customer service has been able to help us when issues did come up.
- The ability to see your audience's level of interest and interaction is useful for marketing purposes, especially. Using the presenter dashboard, you can see how many people are actively engaged in your webinar vs. how many have it on in the background. You can use that information to alter your approach in real-time or in future presentations.
Cons
- We have had some issues using GoTo to run a live webinar that is based on a previous recording. In our particular instance, we had a panelist have to cancel last minute, and it was a struggle to successfully record a practice to then run for the live webinar. The platform is built more for a live-session.
- In the past, we have had recordings disappear. We record all of our webinars to then house online for people to watch at their leisure (a common practice). There have been, on more than one occasion, recordings that were either not saved or were saved and then gone, with no explanation. We had to contact GoTo for help, and they were unable to recover the lost recording.
- While the sync with Marketo works, in order to update a member's status from "invited" or "registered" to attended, you have to re-sync the connection. It will update on its own eventually, but if you want to send a follow-up or thank you email based on attendees within 24 hours, you have to request the sync. It's not a time-consuming process, but for everything working so seamlessly, it is surprising and a little disappointing.
- We have found that sound issues are common when running a webinar with panelists off-site and sometimes even on-site. While that's not completely unexpected, it has been noticeable to the point of being completely unable to hear a designated speaker/presenter.
- Our webinars have helped to drive traffic to our site, and we have acquired leads through their ongoing success.
- GoTo's sync with Marketo has improved our reporting capabilities on the efficacy of webinars as a marketing device.
Using GoToWebinar
3 - Every user of GoToWebinar in our organization works on our commercial team, either in marketing, account development, or system support for those teams. Our marketing and account development employees are responsible for running the webinars and creating the content around them; system support manages the sync to Marketo and troubleshoots any technology-related issues.
Our three users of GoToWebinar work together to troubleshoot, but since it is not yet an integral part of our complete software usage, there is no one designated to support it on a large scale.
- Marketing Webinars
Evaluating GoToWebinar and Competitors
- Price
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Because our organization already uses GoToMeeting, when we decided to start hosting our own sponsored webinars, it made the most sense to add GoToWebinar to our pre-existing relationship with Citrix. It made the choice the most fiscally responsible for us, and it required little setup time upfront, so we could start testing the marketing use of webinars quickly.
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