Goldcast

After running just one event on BigMarker, Georgianne Parker, Senior Manager, Events & Field Marketing at FullStory could tell it wasn’t going to deliver the excellent digital experiences their audience expects. Once they switched to Goldcast, they saw a huge bump in registrations, audience satisfaction, and overall event ROI.

Georgianne Parker, Senior Manager, Events & Field Marketing at FullStory is part of a demand generation team that runs more than 100 events a year across in-person, hybrid, and digital. As a digital experience company, they’re highly focused on offering their prospects and customers excellent digital experiences. But unfortunately, their digital events platform didn’t deliver on their high expectations.

“Primarily we wanted to create a good digital experience for those people attending our events, starting with registration all the way through to reminders to attending the actual event and then the post event process as well,” said Georgianne.

From the get-go, the team hit issues with delivering that excellent digital experience. “We were getting a ton of issues in regards to people filling out the form and not getting any sort of confirmation,” explained Taylor Whetstone, Marketing Ops Manager at FullStory.

The FullStory team was also disappointed with the digital event engagement opportunities offered within BigMarker. After running just one event, they knew it was time for a change. “We know from FullStory’s global consumer survey, when customers experience a digital problem or frustration, 64% report that they’re likely or very likely to leave without completing their transaction. They're not giving you another try,” mentioned Georgianne.

Another huge issue they faced with BigMarker was the inability to scale. “BigMarker was a tremendous lift for my team, the event team, the MOPS team, design and web team,” remarked Georgianne. “I calculated and it took me on average six hours just to set up one webinar with BigMarker. It took way more bandwidth than it should have just to produce something small.”

Producing one event on Big Marker took:

• 6 hours of setup time
• 2 support team members
• 40 minutes of Marketo testing

One of the most frustrating issues was how technical the platform was on the backend. Georgianne and Taylor, who both consider themselves pretty technical, struggled to learn the platform and scale their events program.

“I felt like anytime I wanted to bring in anybody else to use the platform, it was a lot of hand holding. We had two whole staffers at BigMarker that were dedicated to us. It just was not scalable at that level,” stated Georgianne.

For a team running a global digital events strategy, these technical issues and scalability blockers were a deal breaker.

The FullStory team found out about Goldcast after attending an episode of CMO Diaries and were immediately impressed by how engaging the platform was. “I think it's a better experience all the way around. It's something that we can easily get people into and they don't have that bad experience right at the registration form,” said Georgianne.

When they began looking for a BigMarker alternative, they had a 36-point checklist to measure digital event platforms against. Goldcast won against all other digital event platforms they considered.

What was on their digital events platform evaluation list? Here’s just a few items of importance that Goldcast ranked high on:

• A strong Marketo integration
• Self-serve reporting
• Clear registration and attendance metrics by session
• Engagement tools like chat, polls, emojis, and popups
• Security features like SOC 2 compliance
• Easy backend setup and editing abilities
• Accessible support channels for issues (chat bot + CX rep)
• Calendar invites and pre-scheduled emails.

The FullStory team was majorly impressed by how easy Goldcast made it to set up, edit, and run events. “I like how intuitive Goldcast is versus what we were dealing with in BigMarker.

It [BigMarker] was quite technical and changing one thing in one place was not sufficient; you had to change in like three or four,” remarked Taylor. “Goldcast allows us to do things ourselves, but we have that nice backup of support whenever we need it. We get an answer quickly and from an expert,” added Georgianne.

And don’t forget about the Marketo and Wistia integrations! Taylor loves that Goldcast automatically uploads recordings into Wistia, saving her tons of time.

But her favorite part might be the speed of the Marketo integration: “The fact that during the webinar as people are logging in and entering through their magic link, that's just sending straight over to Marketo as an attended status. It's within seconds. It's not even like I have to wait 15 minutes and then I have to go check. No, it's in there immediately.”

One other area FullStory thinks Goldcast really shines is by providing a strong digital experience from beginning to end. “We've automated the reminder emails and they get better reminders automatically on their calendar. Once they log in, they stick around a little bit longer and they engage. They have the fun GIFs, the emojis, and all the things that you can do in the platform. And the content just looks better too.”

Once the FullStory demand generation team transitioned to Goldcast, they were able to immediately scale their webinar programming. They went from running less than five webinars a year to more than 17 in just a few months with Goldcast.

“Now we even have monthly repeatable webinars. We’ve scaled substantially and I expect it'll continue at this scale,” stated Georgianne.

By switching from BigMarker to Goldcast, the team at FullStory:

• Saw an 8X return in qualified pipeline from webinars alone
• Grew average webinar registration from 75 to 360
• Reduced event setup time from six hours to 15 minutes
• Increased attendance rate from 44% to 77%
• Eliminated manual Marketo setups and saved 30 minutes per event

Beyond these results, the team also saw an impact on their audience’s overall experience, especially when it comes to the event registration process. Since moving from BigMarker to Goldcast, they have not received one complaint about a form not working or showing up. “We don't have any of those friction points that we had the previous year, which is amazing and 100% worth the switch,” shared Taylor.

FullStory’s Event Success Metrics at a Glance

• 33% increase in event attendance rate
• 3X webinar production
• 480% growth in webinar registration per event

Goldcast’s impact on the team’s pipeline and revenue has been huge. “When we purchased Goldcast the goal was a 8X return in qualified pipeline. We have surpassed that already with just our monthly repeatable webinars,” shared Georgianne. Even more impressive is that they’ve only been running these live monthly demo webinars for six months!

Overall, the demand generation team at FullStory has been exceptionally happy with their Goldcast experience.

“Goldcast is the forerunner of digital event platforms. I have tried close to all of them, and Goldcast checks the most boxes and has the best digital experience,” said Georgianne. “From a digital experience intelligence company to say, ‘this is the best digital experience’ I think that's huge.”

Here’s just a glance at what the FullStory team is hoping to accomplish in 2024 with Goldcast:

Georgianne is very excited to begin using Goldcast’s Content Lab, an AI-powered editing suite to turn your events into a multi-channel content strategy. It uses AI to automatically clip video snippets, produce robust blog content, and more. FullStory wants to use it to continue ramping up their video strategy.

“I spent 30 seconds playing with it so far, and it's actually really good. I was super impressed,” she shared. She’s also looking forward to using the AI to automatically create post-event summaries to share with the sales team. It will save her lots of time (and a bit of her sanity!) to automate that process through Content Lab.

Since FullStory serves a global audience, they’re excited to continue expanding their international webinars and virtual events with Goldcast. In 2024, they’re hoping to put out even more digital events for the NAM & EMEA regions.

The last tool FullStory plans to check out is Goldcast’s new Field Events tool. They believe it could be really handy since they run a variety of in-person and hybrid events. The new feature creates easy-to-use QR codes registrations, provides effortless on-site check-in, and syncs attendee data to your CRM.

Overall, the FullStory team has seen great success and ROI by switching from BigMarker to Goldcast. But it’s not just the ROI that makes a big impact, as Georgianne stated: “Not only does Goldcast have the positive ROI, it has the time savings as well.”

“And the positive digital experiences our execs and customers have experienced using it. They've rated those events high. Spark London, our big one, was rated at 9.75 out of 10. We ran the registration and the agenda components through Goldcast, and it was a good digital experience.”