Goldcast

When it comes to dream teams, Zuora has hit the talent trifecta.

On the digital programs side, Sabrina Pallazola, Zuora’s Global Programs Specialist, stays focused on scaling the brand’s webinars while Head of Global Demand Program Strategy Hayley Ferrante leads omni-channel program strategy. Tying it all together, Senior Marketing Operations Manager Ande Kempf handles the key automations and integrations that make their programs possible. 

With a digital marketing machine this well-oiled, it’s no surprise programs play a pivotal role at Zuora.

We sat down with the team to get the inside scoop on both the strategy and execution driving Zuora’s highly strategic and scalable programs.

If there’s one word to describe Zuora’s webinar and digital events strategy, it’s: full-throttle.

At Zuora, events aren’t owned and utilized by just one team. Instead, they are a fundamental way of achieving departmental goals across all stages of the funnel.

• Top-of-funnel goals: Create broad awareness and thought leadership.
• Middle-of-funnel goals: Drive product and campaign-specific awareness.
• Bottom-of-funnel goals: Solve problems and deliver product demos.

For the Zuora team, these high-level marketing goals lay the foundation of Zuora’s cross-functional event strategy:

Growth: Product-based with a traditional demand gen function.

Currently, the largest number of events fall within this category, utilizing webinars as the standard format for driving 1-to-many conversations.

‍Brand experience: Keystone events and raising broad awareness.

‍Events in this category include corporate events, sponsor tradeshows, plus larger and longer virtual events. Corporate events span thought leadership content and products, targeted toward both prospects and customers.

Zuora’s digital program strategy is about as far as you can get from your average webinar program. But to execute it efficiently, the team knew their existing event platform wasn’t going to cut it.

“The platform we were previously using was more simple—it was a vessel for us to deliver content,” says Hayley, Zuora’s Head of Global Demand Program Strategy.

“But what we needed was a vessel to deliver content and experiences. It just wasn’t fitting into our goals to facilitate a true virtual experience, collect more event analytics, run polls, and surface hand-raisers. Pricing was a big component too and it needed to integrate well with our systems.”

The team started poking around at other events to see what platforms they were using.

“There were so many tools out there, but when it came to a Goldcast event, I knew it was Goldcast by the sheer simplicity and sophistication of how it looked and the level of branding—it’s just in a different universe than the other platforms I've seen,” Hayley explains.

Now that they’d found a platform that could match the sophistication of their strategy, the event team at Zuora was ready to start scaling.

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When you’re a Marketing Ops wizard like Ande, integration is key.

“A lot of integrations require an extensive amount of time to steward attendance data, unique login links or event engagement data syncing accurately to a marketing automation platform (MAP). We really wanted a tool that was going to natively sync to our programs and Goldcast has been easy and provided a clean way to surface event attendance & engagement metadata and to scale to more events.”

She uses the Marketo integration to seamlessly track registrants and attendees and trigger workflows based on their interaction and engagement.

“It's been a real boost to our events strategy - we’ve been able to collect key information from Goldcast into Marketo to further optimize our event programs and it’s super easy to use and set up. It just works.”

While the right integrations are essential, it’s the data those integrations deliver that really make the difference.

The Zuora team uses Goldcast’s Data & Analytics to:

• Identify marketing qualified leads (MQLs): If a hand-raiser is logged in at an event and matches the ideal customer profile (ICP), it becomes an MQL for Zuora’s business development reps (BDRs). 
• Send personalized event follow-ups: “Our teams can look at a report and come armed to the conversation with, ‘Hey, I saw you engaged in this way’. Documents downloaded, poll and survey responses, hand-raisers and Q&A allow field marketers to understand what prospects are wanting to learn about and be that resource for them,” says Hayley.
• Discover which content resonates most: The Zuora team identifies what content attendees are downloading, viewing, and responding to and use this data to drive future event content.
• Inform strategy: View drop-off time and engagement levels across sessions and events to consistently meet and exceed attendee expectations.

If you’re going to make a lasting impact, everything from your brand colors to your favicon needs to be consistent.

“Customization is at the root of everything,” says Hayley.

“I remember when we were playing around with the platform and the customization was so simple and easy. Even Sabrina, who was just learning the platform, could go in and change the hex code or make our ‘talk to sales button’ a different call to action. As long as we can dream it, we can build it with Golcast’s customizations.”

When it comes to attendee experience, every Goldcast customer has their favorite features.

And the Zuora team is no exception. As the person responsible for scaling Zuora’s webinars (without cutting corners on experience), Sabrina loves the support she gets via the following features:

• Automated calendar invites: “The ‘add to calendar’ functionality just blew my mind. We signed up for an event and it was already on our calendars before I even looked at the confirmation email. We wanted the easiest user experience possible with the least amount of clicks, so this is a great feature and we love it.”
• Easy ‘talk to sales’ CTAs: “The ‘talk to sales’ button is very important to us and was one of the factors we considered when looking at platforms. We wanted to increase the ways people can engage with our sales team to help build pipeline.”
• Resource center: “The resource center is a great way to cross-promote events by segueing to the next webinar in the upcoming session, or attaching supplemental reports or whitepapers.”
• Real-time updates: “Being able to go in, make changes and have them reflected in real-time was insane to me. If there's a doc you want to add at the last minute while the event's going on, you can literally go in and add it which is awesome.”

Engagement is excellent. Features are fun. And integrations are crucial.

But for Ande, Hayley and Sabrina, their top priority was having a platform with a supportive team. The way they see it, a great partner is:

• Responsive: “Support was super fast,” shares Ande. “Anytime I needed something, I'd get a really quick response. Goldcast has been really responsive to our requests to enhance the tool and optimize to our needs. That's huge.”
• Transparent: “Goldcast shares the product portal so we can see and track what upcoming implementations are under consideration versus in progress and give feedback in real-time. You can also submit your own ideas, which is a great way for customers to feel like they have a voice and inherently creates a community” says Sabrina.
• Ready to help: “Everybody I've worked with at Goldcast has just been fantastic. You want to feel like you have a partner as you're trying to navigate a world that is ever-changing. Especially in this space, knowing that someone has our backs and can jump on if we had an issue is a very, very valuable trait.”

For the team at Zuora, switching to Goldcast has already yielded a solid uplift in attendance, plus glowing qualitative feedback from field leaders.

“We saw other marketing teams we trusted using Goldcast and we got to see the attendee experiences for ourselves,” recalls Hayley. “It was an immediate lightbulb moment for us that this is the experience we wanted to be able to serve our customers and prospects.”

In just eight months, Zuora’s expert digital programs team has scaled its events across departments and demand gen functions with the help of a platform that places the attendee experience at the heart of every event.

With an event platform fit for the future, Zuora can seamlessly track attendees, drive authentic conversations with hand-raisers, and take their event strategy to a whole new level.