Marketing Event Based Workflows

Moving on from my favorite topic of email subscription and regulation: Marketing Events are now a workflow trigger, in public beta, all hubs and tiers. When a Marketing Event is created or updated you can send notifications, create tasks and update properties, and the panel's reason is automation across associated objects such as companies, deals and campaigns.

“I try to read this ten times to make sense of it,” and the part I kept landing on was the associations with campaigns. It's basically starting to use the automation in HubSpot for project management instead of communication. Zach went straight to the project object: a new event lands, and now there are things to go do.

Then there's the note at the bottom of the panel, and it's maddening: “Actions related to contacts, attendees, registrants, etc. are not currently supported.” Usually we're using workflows to try and communicate with folks. So this is baby steps, and the communication side isn't here yet.

Zach asked whether you could do this before. Casey's answer was yes, as a contact-based workflow, and Zach added that you'd also have to manually add your marketing event to the campaign. Casey said she still looks at workflows the way they used to be, where you pick contact, company or deal and everything else hangs off that, and that this new world is one she keeps finding use cases for, but it doesn't always come naturally.

Here is why I think it exists: “People make custom objects that are called events, so they can do this stuff that they need to do, because marketing events has not been really easy to use. Not been a full-fledged object.” Good progress. And this is how I'd think about it: “Are we trying to do communication? Are we trying to do project management? Project management hasn't really been a thing. So if you can wrap your mind around that, then it starts to make sense why you'd want to automatically update a campaign based on what's happening with the marketing event. That makes a ton of sense.”

What to do: if your events create coordination work, such as tasks, property updates or notifications tied to a company, a deal or a campaign, try the trigger. If your event follow-up is all contact, attendee or registrant communication, skip it for now, because the panel says those actions aren't supported yet.