The News: News of a partnership between RainFocus and Adobe to enhance management of marketing data was announced this week. The event management technology platform provider announced it has joined the Adobe Exchange Partner Program as a Premium Partner. As part of the partnership, RainFocus will work to develop ways that user data collected from its virtual event platform can be integrated in a more meaningful way with Adobe’s Marketo customer relationship management solution. Details of the working arrangement are available in the Press Release issued by RainFocus.
RainFocus and Adobe Forge Partnership to Enhance Management of Marketing Data and Help Deliver Better Business Value
Analyst Take: The new working relationship between RainFocus and Adobe serves to underscore the potential – and the limitations – of using virtual events as a venue for corporate marketing and sales lead generation.
At one level, virtual events provide an unparalleled platform that corporate marketers can leverage to learn more about the interests and intentions of their sales prospects. By tracking the time that individuals spend attending a virtual event, the presentations these visitors see while they are there, and the individuals they meet with while in attendance, marketers have access to a treasure trove of data that can help them better understand and classify purchase intent among their sales prospects.
The primary challenge comes in converting this attendee data into information that sales teams can effectively use to prioritize their follow-ups on sales leads. In general, it would be expected that individuals who are active and engaged in a specific virtual event could be identified as being more interested – or engaged in – consideration of a product purchase. The challenge comes in taking all this insight that can be drawn for virtual event attendee data and converting it into a format that informs the sales prioritization process.
In many instances, customer relationship management platforms – such as the Marketo solution from Adobe – are not seen as particularly nimble forums for ingesting virtual event analytics data. You might be able to know that a sales lead attended a specific presentation and might even have a log of sales brochures they attended while visiting on online exhibitor booth. Yet the sales management system might not capture other data – such as the questions an individual asked during a session or the identities of other attendees they interacted with during their time at the show. If captured and packaged correctly, such data could provide additional insight that could be used to fine-tune an organization’s sales efforts.
That’s where the RainFocus Adobe partnership comes in. By engaging more deeply in the Adobe partner program, RainFocus is taking tangible steps to help Marketo make better use of the avalanche of data that can be culled from virtual event attendance analytics. Better solutions for packaging the data will ultimately improve sales results for organizations producing virtual events, giving them reason to produce and participate in additional virtual events at a later date.
The partnership between RainFocus and Adobe will not immediately clear away all the hurdles that stand in the way of optimizing the value generated for virtual event audience analytics, but I do see it as representing an important first step that will enhance the business value that can result for producing and sponsoring online event venues.
Disclosure: Wainhouse Research, part of The Futurum Group family of companies, is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Wainhouse Research as a whole.
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Image Credit: Adobe
The original version of this article was first published on Wainhouse Research.
