ON24 announced a partnership with LinkedIn to change B2B event marketing. This integration connects digital experiences to professional audiences more easily. Users can create ON24-hosted events and publish them directly to LinkedIn Events. They can also use LinkedIn registration forms that feed into ON24. Additionally, users can run promotion campaigns through LinkedIn’s ad platform. All event engagement data will sync into CRM and marketing automation systems.
What the Integration Enables
Through this integration, ON24 customers gain several key operational and strategic advantages:
- Easy Event Creation & Publishing: Quickly publish events from ON24 to LinkedIn Events. This lets organizations access LinkedIn’s large professional network in no time.
- Seamless Registration Workflow: LinkedIn registration forms sync attendee data directly into ON24. This reduces manual entry and enhances lead accuracy.
- Wider Audience Reach: LinkedIn’s targeting and ad tools increase your visibility. This helps attract the right professionals for your digital events.
- Connected Data Flows: Registrations, engagement metrics, and other event data integrate with ON24. They can connect to CRM and marketing platforms. This gives marketers better insights into how successful their campaigns are.
“By partnering with LinkedIn, we are bringing together two leaders from their respective fields,” said Sharat Sharan, CEO of ON24. “Combining ON24’s intelligent engagement platform with LinkedIn’s professional reach, we’re helping customers attract the right audiences to their events, seamlessly promote their events more effectively, and build deeper engagement that delivers measurable business results before, during and after every event.”
Implications for the Marketing Automation Industry
This move has major implications for marketing automation and how businesses will operate:
Events Become a Core Marketing Automation Channel
Webinars and digital events are key to B2B demand generation and engagement. They now fit into organized automation workflows—registration → engagement → nurturing → conversion. This connects events to marketing systems. It changes event marketing from just a tactic into a main strategy.
Data Synced & Actionable Across Systems
Pushing registrant and engagement data into CRM and marketing platforms automatically helps. It reduces manual tasks, cuts down on data silos, and speeds up actions. This flow boosts attribution and campaign measurement. Marketers can then take next steps, like sending drip emails and follow-ups, based on event interactions. This marks a step forward in automation capabilities.
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Platform Convergence and Ecosystem Expectation
Marketing teams expect tools to work together easily. The ON24-LinkedIn partnership shows that vendors must connect closely with the wider automation ecosystem. This includes ad networks and CRM systems. This raises the standards for marketing tools to support wider workflows and integrations.
Audience Reach and Precision Matter More
In B2B marketing, reaching the right professionals is crucial. By merging LinkedIn’s audience reach with ON24’s engagement tools, marketers can run more targeted campaigns. They can also measure how event engagement affects pipeline movement. This boosts expectations for automation workflows. They should target professionals, optimize events, and score leads based on event behavior.
Effects on Businesses Operating in This Ecosystem
For marketing teams, agencies, automation-platform vendors and event-technology providers, the integration produces both opportunities and strategic considerations:
Opportunities:
- Marketing teams can run digital-event programs with fewer bottlenecks (registration, setup, promotion) and faster lead-activation through integrated flows.
- Agencies servicing B2B brands gain a stronger value-proposition: ability to tie event investment directly to measured outcomes in marketing-automation systems.
- Marketing-automation vendors and CRM platforms should explore how event-data flows add value—there’s opportunity in building connectors, dashboards and workflows around such integrations.
Event-tech providers should evolve from standalone platforms to parts of bigger marketing-automation systems. This means offering data connectors, registration syncing, ad integration, and scoring logic.
Key Considerations & Challenges:
- Data governance: Businesses must get consent, protect privacy, and ensure data quality for attendee info on all platforms.
- Integration complexity: Companies need to monitor how LinkedIn event data moves into ON24 and then into their marketing systems. This includes clear attribute mapping, trigger logic, and lead scoring.
- Measurement & Attribution: Marketing teams need to track how event engagement impacts pipeline and conversion metrics. Automated dashboards and workflow logic are essential.
- Content and experience quality: The event experience is key. Marketing workflows rely on engaging formats to boost conversions. It’s about relevance, not just technical setup.
Looking Ahead: How to Leverage This Shift
To take advantage of this development, marketing-automation stakeholders should consider:
- Audit your event-to-campaign workflow. Map how events fit into marketing systems. Identify gaps like registration sync, attribution, and follow-up, then plan for improvements.
- Enable LinkedIn-based event promotion. Use LinkedIn’s targeting features wisely. Segment by role, filter by industry, and run ads for event registration. This will feed high-quality leads into automation systems.
- Define event-driven triggers. If an attendee watches 50% of a session, send a nurture email. If someone registers but doesn’t show, send a personalized invite. If chat engagement is high, assign the lead to sales. Use marketing automation for this.
- Track event ROI. Connect metrics like registration, attendance, and engagement to pipeline, opportunities, and revenue. Use automation dashboards and workflows for follow-up.
- Partner with ecosystem vendors. Combine event tech, marketing automation, CRM, and LinkedIn workflows into one stack. Choose vendors that support data flow and integration.
Conclusion
The ON24-LinkedIn integration is a milestone in digital event marketing and marketing automation. It allows seamless workflows from event creation to CRM and automation systems. This collaboration turns events into key components of a modern B2B marketing strategy.
For businesses in marketing automation, the message is clear: integrate events into a data-driven system. This system should include registration, content, engagement, scoring, and conversion. Organizations that adapt to these workflows will reach more people, track results better, and boost their pipeline impact.