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How Aptitude 8 Helped FloQast Host Their First Ever Virtual Event

With the unexpectedness of COVID19, all businesses had to adapt to deliver what used to be a known playbook.

Suzanne Marsalisi
Suzanne Marsalisi

Mar 31, 2021

With the unexpectedness of COVID19, all businesses had to adapt to deliver what used to be a known playbook. One of our clients, FloQast, was no exception. As a leading provider of accounting workflow automation software, FloQast had been preparing to host their annual user conference in person as they had every year before. 

 Floqast’s large annual user conference was scheduled for September, and for the first time ever, they had to deliver it virtually with little notice due the global pandemic. To make things more interesting, the event was 2.5 months out and the company had just started a migration from Pardot to HubSpot. 

 The challenges were going to be: getting users to register, ensuring attendees are engaged throughout, and perhaps most importantly - the post-event content and experience had to be seamless and effortless for users so that we could capture additional engagement and extra leads. FloQast knew they had to stand out amidst the flood of virtual events. 

 The obstacles working against us were: the marketing automation migration, the complexities of running a 2-day 16+ session virtual event for the first time, and the most tricky of all was a limitation of their webinar platform that forced on-demand registrants to go through a ‘waiting room’ page; which created a disjointed experience. 

 The solutions were just as tricky as the problems, but Aptitude 8’s team of RevOps and Demand Generation consultants and strategists rose to the occasion. 

 One of the biggest solutions was creating an environment and a community around the virtual event so that it could feel as ‘real’ as possible. We designed and developed a day-of arena inside the HubSpot CMS where users could chat in a dedicated Slack channel, access live/on-demand sessions, review the agenda, the speakers, and learn more about the event itself all within a single web experience. HubSpot’s new CMS features allowed for us to bridge the gap between a web page and an application to deliver something that truly stood out for attendees.

Because the page was custom developed with a handy left-hand navigation for the day-of arena and limited heavy editing, we leveraged HubSpot CTAs so that we could update the live → on-demand links directly in the HubSpot CTAs feature, rather than having to edit the code of the page template. This allowed for the FloQast team to manage the event during the day of broadcast and swap content on the front of the site dynamically, all while attendees stayed in the same web experience. Communication was very much an integral component, so a robust email marketing and outreach campaign were built into the plan and executed on to drive attendance. 

 The other big obstacle with this event was that the FloQast team wanted to provide a seamless user experience that wasn’t possible with the native ON24 integration. The standard integration allows for a form to be filled out, a user to receive a registration confirmation, and then click through that email to get to the event. This is fine when you are only running a single webinar or delivering a single piece of on demand content, but the Take Control event had dozens of sessions running throughout the day, and many of them concurrently. 

 One option was to ungate all of the content, but then the FloQast team would be denied all of the data about their attendees, engagement levels, which sessions they watched, and all the marketing data they moved to HubSpot so they could capture. 

 FloQast wanted users to be able to enter multiple webinars at a time and have a “home base” on the main page to click into webinars without needing to wait for an email confirmation after each form fill. 

To bypass the ‘waiting room’ we had to create a custom snippet of javascript that pulled data from the access form to populate a unique URL with the user’s email address, event key, and event ID which lands the user directly into the on-demand session, fully bypassing the waiting room by using ON24’s “real time registration” API. 

 Unfortunately, this would require the script be constantly edited by a developer, preventing it from being truly scalable and making it impossible for the FloQast team to manage. 

 To solve this issue, Aptitude 8 built this javascript into a HubSpot CMS Module, prompting the user to simply enter a form ID and the ON24 event ID during page configuration. This could all be done natively inside of HubSpot, and doesn’t require the user to have any knowledge of code. 

 With this new flow, users could fill out a form just once to get to the main event page, and then navigate into any of the ON24 webinars while inside. Using our custom ON24 integration, users would bypass the waiting room and the standard ON24 integration will push back analytics on which webinars users attended and watched, providing a seamless experience that also delivers the marketing analytics data the FloQast team needs to power future campaigns. 

 Floqast’s first-ever virtual user conference went off without a hitch! We drove high attendance, provided an effortless registration & on-demand experience, created new contacts, influenced thousands more, created opportunities, closed deals, drove in revenue, and created robust dashboards to track and measure the following:

- 1,370 registrants

- 35% registration conversion rate

- 201 on-demand registrants

- 35% conversion rate on on-demand

- 2,479 sessions

- 5,480 influenced contacts 

 FloQast chose Aptitude 8 for the job, because we were already migrating them from their current Pardot instance over to HubSpot. They knew our team has a high acumen when it comes to both custom and advanced builds using the HubSpot platform.  The FloQast team was also able to leverage both our technical and creative teams for this project, without having to sign multiple SOWs or managing multiple agencies to deliver the experience they wanted.

If you're interested in learning more about how we can help you with custom HubSpot solutions, contact us here!

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