Adobe Connect Blog

The Adobe Digital Marketing Summit is taking place in Salt Lake City, March 4 – 8.  It is the premium event to explore the latest tools and trends in the digital marketing arena.

Webinars, or digital events, are fast becoming a critical tool used by marketers to find prospects, nurture leads or educate customers.  Budget once reserved to live tradeshows or live events is shifting towards online webinars.  Yet, marketers find it hard to measure the effectiveness of their webinars because the analytics they get is completely siloed.

Producing a webinar can be broken down into three parts:

• Getting prospects / customers to register for the event and attend
• Engage the audience during the actual events (or post the event with a recording)
• Forward the leads generated to sales

Each part generate its own set of analytics which is not integrated.  For example, for the first part, marketers typically get insight on how many people came to the registration site set-up from the different marketing campaigns that they have run (do they come from banner ads, google ads, social media engagement). For the last part, they get an overall idea of how many total leads they generated for sales.   But it is very hard for them to answer one very simple question:  which campaign actually generated the most qualified leads? was it the banner ads, the google ads or the social media engagement?

Adobe Connect 9 provides out of the box the close loop analytics required to answer this question.  But it can do much more.  Come to the Adobe Summit to learn how you can leverage other tools from the Adobe Marketing Tools to optimize your webinar programs and integrate them within your digital marketing strategy:

• Learn how to test multiple registration form to identify which ones drives the most registration with Test and Target
• Learn how to incorporate registration within your social media strategy with Adobe Experience Manager
• Learn how to add behavioral information from webinars into your lead scoring strategy with Adobe Analytics

There are many more reason to attend the Summit.  Black Keys will be performing; Keynotes from Felix Baumgartner, or Sal Khan (from Khan Academy), and the slopes are nearby if you are a skier or snowboarder !  Register here.

Over the past year, recognition continued to roll in for Adobe Connect.  Another great review that came in at the end of 2012 was from Network World.

Network World conducted side-by-side comparisons of eight of the leading Web conferencing vendors and ranked Adobe Connect in a tie for first. The Network World web conferencing vendor test ranked the services according to four scenarios ranging from meetings of two to five people to large scale webinars.

We were excited to see the areas where the review praised Adobe Connect, including the ability to host large-scale webinars calling it a “post-conferencing reporting powerhouse.” Network World also noted “Connect also has the strongest features when it came to measuring audience engagement and supporting archival meeting content.” Other areas where Network World positioned Adobe Connect above other offerings were the recording options available, including the ability to record the chats and participants names, and its mobile client, noting its “consistent user interfaces and clean look.”

In addition, the review discussed persistent URLs for Adobe Connect meeting rooms, calling them “handy when a team is working over a period of time on a set of documents.” As our customers know, this feature is also useful for setting up last-minute, ad hoc meetings.

Another area the review considered was the audio options each service provides. Our own Alistair Lee recently blogged about our Universal Voice feature, which lets users leverage VoIP or their audio provider of choice.

We’re interested in what you have to say, though, after you give the roundup review a read. Let us know what stands out, good and bad, and what you’d like to see more of from us moving forward.

Yesterday, Adobe launched the Adobe Marketing Cloud “Metrics Not Myths” campaign.  This campaign aims to counter common statements hurled at Marketers like “Marketing is BS”, that it is hard to measure ROI on marketing investments.  Here is a funny video made for the campaign.

This “Metrics not Myths” plays well for webinars as well.  Up to 75% of all webinars are run for marketing purpose either to generate leads or to move prospect up the interest ladder.  Yet we found that marketers have difficulty measuring the ROI they are getting on their webinars or optimizing their webinar spend because they are getting an incomplete picture of the performance of their webinars.

For example, before the webinar, they typically can track which campaign draws the most registrations.  After the webinar, they can see who attended and who did not.  From the registration data they can qualify the lead based on demographics data.   But they can not tell which campaign generated the most qualified leads (and not just the most registration).  Was it the email invitation, the banner ads, the paid search keywords etc…?

Adobe Connect 9 Reporting

Enters Adobe Connect 9 and our integration with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud.  Out of the box, our webinar solution enables, marketers to identify the most qualified leads based not only on demographics data collected during registration, but also on behavioral data collected during the webinar.  We provide also reports that track which campaign brought these qualified leads to register, toattend the webinar, and help optimize the webinar spend the next time around.

With additional configurations, using Adobe’s Marketing Cloud Digital Analytics, our customers can correlate webinar data to their website traffic data, being able to identify which pages registrants looked at, which document did they download before attending the webinar.  This behavioral data can be used to further optimize the web path to get user to register for webinars or to further qualified leads based on behavior on the website.

Getting this insight is true gold for marketers and uniquely enabled by the close integration between Adobe Connect 9 and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud.

Guillaume Privat | Director, Adobe Connect

Today, I’m extremely pleased to announce the next major release of Adobe Connect, Adobe Connect 9.  It will change the way people’s perspective on web conferencing.

This new version of Adobe Connect brings with it features that will help our customers produce even better webinars and collaborate and train even more effectively using mobile devices.

Adobe Connect 9 also leverages industry-leading technologies from other parts of the company to help provide end to end solutions that spans business process that happens before the meeting and after the meeting.

We worked with the Adobe CQ team to build in capabilities that will enable our customers to create rich, branded event landing pages or entire micro-sites that can be used for event promotion and registration.

Adobe SiteCatalyst provides web analytics for some of the biggest brands and websites in the world. We’re leveraging that same engine in Adobe Connect 9 to help our customers measure the success of their webinars and marketing or outreach campaigns.

We’re even able to provide real-time feedback inside of a webinar or virtual classroom with a new pod called the Engagement Dashboard. This dashboard helps presenters and hosts track message effectiveness.

In addition to Adobe Connect 9, we’re also announcing the next version of Adobe Connect Mobile. Version 2 brings with it even more support for meeting hosts to manage the meeting, share documents, and annotate on whiteboards or content. It also increases support for virtual classrooms – incorporating breakout rooms, raise-hand functionality, and many sharing options. There is no longer the need for a traditional PC; Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0 enables device to device collaboration.

With Adobe Connect 9 and Adobe Mobile 2.0, we are powering the use of web conferencing in mission critical business processes across organizations.

Last week, I published a sneak peek showing you some incredible new features that will enable customers to build landing pages to register participants for their events. I’ve seen some stunning examples and these features are largely powered by Adobe CQ5.

It’s not the whole story though. When we spoke to customers about the workflow for their marketing webinars and other events, they spoke about the need to measure the success of these events. Getting people to your event is one part of the equation – analyzing the data after the event is another.

It turns out that Adobe is already an industry leader in web-based analytics through it’s acquisition of Omniture in 2009. In this sneak peek, I’ll show you how a future version of Adobe Connect can leverage Adobe SiteCatalyst to help customers analyze their events and qualify leads.

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect 

Two weeks ago, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco.    It was a very interesting event that touched upon a lot of subjects from how to set-up sales compensation, to boosting sales rep motivation, to what CRM, lead management, analytics system companies should consider implementing.

What stroke me though was how prevalent virtual meetings and webinars have become for sales and marketing organizations to engage with their prospective customers.  Webconferencing has become mission critical to ensure sales rep can talk to prospects, to ensure marketing organization can generate leads via webinars.

Yet many organizations struggle to engage customers virtually.  Their presentation are very bland consisting mostly of voice over screen share and quickly lose the audience to multi-tasking and going back to checking email.

I was particularly interested by a presentation by Carmen Taran from Rexi Media called “Virtual Presentations Can Make or Break You”.  Carmen provided some tips on how to re-engage your audience every 2 minutes – as studies have found this is the most attention span you get from people these days.  Here is what she advocates:

1) vary the type of content frequently: don’t just present slides that follows the same format.  Vary template, add demo, video, simulation, quizzes, games.

2) use intriguing pictures instead of  words to capture the audience attention and force them to listen for the solution of the riddle set in the picture.

3) create emotional connection with the audience, though story or picture.

Adobe Connect offer unsurpassed rich experience to create this emotional engagement with an audience and I was not surprised to see Adobe Connect screen shots in Carmen’s presentation.   We also have a lot of best practices for engaging audience at our community site, www.connectusers.com.