If you’re a smaller marketing team with a limited budget, you might find it difficult to cover all manner of marketing activities. Without a license to a dedicated webinar platform, you may have to combine HubSpot with another tool. The good news is it is possible to leverage HubSpot alongside Google to host a smaller, trackable event.
What You Get for Free:
- Host up to 100 people for your webinar under the 60-minute limit
- Chat with everyone in the meeting using the in-meeting chat
- Live captions are available to give you subtitles as people speak
- You can still hide that messy bedroom/office with virtual office backgrounds
- Meet supports Q&A and hand raising. You can also turn on and off the ability for ALL users to turn their microphones on and individually mute users.
What’s Not Included:
- No time extension unless you opt for a premium plan
- No analytics to see how engaged your audience was or track your key performance indicators
- Unable to record your meetings on the free version
Here’s how we'd do it for a client
1. Connect your chosen calendar to HubSpot first
- If you are the host, use your own account. If not, create a new HubSpot user called ‘Marketing Events’ with a new Google account email. This can be your unnamed HubSpot user for events
- Select your preferred time slot for the event in Google calendar
- Crucially, ensure "Add Google Meet video conferencing" is selected. This usually happens automatically but make sure its active
- Fill in all relevant event details within the "Description" section on the calendar. This is where you can provide an agenda, speaker information, or any other details for your attendees
- Click "Save" to create the initial event
2. Invite Participants
Once the event is created, you can invite your attendees:
- In the event window, locate the "Guests" section on the right
- If you’ve used a HubSpot form to gather your registrants, and you want to vet them, create an active Guests invitation list to add each approved registrant. Remember to click "Save" after adding guests or making any other updates.
- Google Meet will automatically send invites to all added participants.
3. Publish and Make Your Event Public
To ensure your webinar is accessible to a broader audience via a shareable link, you need to publish it:
- Open the event in your Google Calendar.
- Click on "More actions" (often represented by three dots).
- Select "Publish event."
- A new window will display a link to your meeting and embed code. You can use this to embed the event details into a landing page or email.
- To make the event publicly visible and accessible to anyone with the link, click on "Default visibility" and change it to "Public."
- With these steps, your meeting will be visible, and anyone with the link will be able to join.
4. Google Meet Dial-in Option
The Google Meet dial-in feature offers an alternative way to join the meeting, providing a reliable option for anyone with connectivity issues.
Although HubSpot has no native webinar functionality, you can utilise your CRM contacts to identify the right group, and record the meeting attendance against the contact record. Importantly, you’re able to do your pre and post event communication and reporting from HubSpot, using the available tools
By Puneet Bola-Moore