There are usually multiple ways to solve a problem with Marketo and this flexibility may make certain configurations seem daunting. For example, the standard webinar channel has nine progression steps for a single program, so running multiple weekly webinars increases required management time exponentially. In addition, there is no easy way to share one form across multiple webinars without building individual registration pages.
After solving this problem for many of our clients, we were able to develop an elegant solution that works very well. Here’s how we do it:
- There is no way to get around creating individual programs for each webinar, because the details of each event are directly associated to its program. However, cloning from an existing webinar program (without its members), and then modifying the webinar date for the new event, takes just a few minutes from the summary tab.
- Second, I create a separate program that has the master landing page for all the listings. Here’s a link to a live page (http://pages.intermedia.net/monthly-recurring-webinars.html). In this example, I had to also create individual landing pages that included multiple listings since each of them were for a different topic and different dates for each of the topics.
- Use date tokens on the page as well as in the form drop downs. This will allow you to change date values in the tokens and have them appear with the new dates on the landing pages as well as within the registration form. We suggest using a custom “recurring webinar date” to store these token values.
- Have a processing campaign that looks for these dates and uses a campaign request to add the registrant into the correct webinar. Also, to ensure there are no conflicts, remove the webinar date after it’s used so that the registrant is not cookied when he/she goes to register for another webinar scheduled on another date.
It’s just that easy. Our clients have had a lot of success using this best practice for webinar programs and we hope you do too.
