This post is a part of the Interactive Webinar Series where we bring forth various capabilities and innovations in Interactive Webinars by Adobe Marketo Engage. Interactive Webinars was launched in a limited rollout in May 2023 and has evolved since then based on multiple insights that we have received as feedback from our customers and partners. With Interactive Webinars being made generally available, we have exciting new features getting introduced in Interactive Webinars that will help with the three-fold benefits of productivity, intelligence, and actionability for event marketers.
A. What is Interactive Webinars Template?
Interactive Webinars Template is a special functionality in Interactive Webinars that provides users with relevant permission an ability to define standard templates that can be used across webinars conducted in the particular Marketo instance in which the templates have been defined.
This helps in ensuring that the template, layout and pod setup for all the webinars conducted for this organization align with the guidelines of the organization in terms of the type of webinars as well as the methodology used in delivering the webinars for a particular use-case.
For example, say you are running a simu-live webinar. Your organization may define a standard template for simu-live webinars that highlights the layout such as Lobby, Introduction, Conversations, Wrap-up and have specific pods such as Poll pod in the Wrap-up or Presenter Introduction in the lobby layout. This helps standardize the delivery across multiple users so that next time a similar webinar is delivered, it uses the same format and gives an impression of continuity and consistency of engagement for a user who is invited to both these webinars. This internally uplifts the brand equity for the organization and makes a great impression in the eyes of the audience.
This template acts as a base and does not include to restrict the flexibility of the user hosting and presenting the webinar. This provides a guidance that an organization has set so as to define how to deliver a particular type of the webinar. Any guidelines to restrict modification should be set at the organization level and there is no locking available for the templates.
Another example can be setting up templates for different types of webinars say promotional webinars or roadmap sharing webinars. Separate templates can also be setup at a business level say one for Healthcare providers business and other for patients business. Different functions can also have different types of templates say one for the HR and other for the Marketing teams.
B. Why should you use Interactive Webinars Templates?
There are three primary reasons you should use Interactive Webinars Templates:
- Standardization: Organizations would expect consistency in how its brand is portrayed to the external audiences through various channels. Webinars is one of the primary acquisition and nurture channels and hence, it is paramount to ensure that the audience feels uniformity in interactions with the brand through webinars. Interactive Webinars Templates provides a defined way of representing a particular type of webinar based on the objective, business or teams running the webinar. This representation can be in the form of specific storyline in which layouts are created or specific engagement tools inside each layout to supplement the storyline.
- Efficiency: Creating standard layouts for various use-cases provides the host flexibility to modify them to suit individual needs rather than designing the complete webinar from scratch. It reduces duplicate effort especially if the marketers are assigned to conduct webinars with same use-cases such as promotions and thought leadership sessions. Having a design handy makes it much quicker to focus on delivery rather than focussing too much on webinar look and feel.
- Impact: When the audience attends a particular webinar, there is a notable impression that is created for the organization in the minds of the audience. The audience notice the subtle nuances in the way a webinar is conducted, the way in which the story is delivered, the various interesting engagement items such as polls, quiz, trivia etc. that are conducted. These cause a lasting impression in the minds of the audience who is then more attuned to engage and interact more with the audience and attend further webinars. Hence, the host should focus on the subtleties in terms of how pods are placed, size of the pods, which pods are placed in which layout, how many layouts are present, how are layouts organized, does the webinar start with a entry video or with a poll to gather information and so on.
Using Interactive Webinars Templates will culminate into better brand engagement and more interactivity from the audience during the webinar while allowing the organization consistency in terms of managing its brand equity.
C. How do I use Interactive Webinars templates?
For using Interactive Webinars’ templates, a Marketo Admin must create a role or use an existing role and provide the “Access Interactive Webinars Templates” permission to this role in the “Access Design Studio” section. All users then who are added to this role, would have an ability to create an Interactive Webinars Template. It is recommended to create a separate role so that the usage is restricted only to limited set of users and the creation of the templates get moderated.
Once you are added as a user to the role which has this permission, you will see the “Webinar Templates” option appearing in the all new “Interactive Webinars” section appearing in the left navigation. Click on “Manage Templates” and this shall take you to another browser tab that will provide you the ability to create the Interactive Webinars Templates.
This new tab opens up a template manager that lists all the templates that have been already created by your organization. You can also find here all the standard templates that are made available by default by Interactive Webinars.
Click on “Create New” to create a new template or select/search an existing template and open it in a new tab to make modifications or delete the template, if need be.
Creating a new template requires using an existing Organization or Standard Template as a base and providing a name/description for the same. Save the template so that it can be used by other users for creating Interactive Webinars using the new template. Saving will publish it for all users and there is no explicit hide functionality to display only specific templates.
All users creating Interactive Webinars would then observe these Organization templates while designing a particular webinar in a room on clicking “Design Your Webinar”. User can select a particular Organization template which then acts as a base for the user to make certain modifications to tune the webinar according to specific needs while aligning with the overall organizational guidelines.
D. What is next in Interactive Webinar Templates?
Interactive Webinars Templates has been widely used by organizations using Interactive Webinars. We have almost 300 webinar templates created within 3 months of release and we have noticed an increasing trend. And we have received multiple feedbacks and suggestions on how we can further improve this functionality.
Over the next few releases, we would want to include an approval workflow for Interactive Webinars Template (similar to other Design Studio assets) and have a selective view of templates that have been created so that the few responsible can decide which of the templates should be published for wider use.
Another feature that has been frequently requested is the ability to lock certain templates as well as lock a certain portion of the templates. Content locking is another feature we would certainly like to explore for organizations to restrict the usage of certain elements in terms of modification to align with brand guidelines.
That’s all we have for this particular post. We look forward to your organization making use of this functionality that is included in Interactive Webinars and more feedback so that we can improve it to suit your specific needs and use-cases.
Till then, Happy Event Marketing!!!
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