Bulk Import Marketing Events

[sciox68]

The Problem: Currently, HubSpot Marketing Events must be created one by one in the app, which is a time-consuming and inefficient process. While the ability to associate contacts with events is powerful, the manual creation process prevents a user from easily and retroactively logging a large number of past events. This makes it challenging to:

• Attribute contacts to past events: Without the events logged, you can't associate the contacts you've met with a specific historical marketing activity.

• Get a full picture of historical ROI: You can't report on the full impact of your past marketing events, making it difficult to demonstrate their value.

• Scale your marketing operations: As you attend more events, the manual data entry becomes an insurmountable administrative burden, taking time away from more strategic work.

Who This Is For: This feature is for any HubSpot user who wants to track the ROI of their marketing event attendance, but it is especially critical for:

• Marketing teams that regularly attend industry conferences, trade shows, and webinars.

• RevOps specialists who are responsible for data cleanliness and providing a full picture of marketing attribution.

• Sales teams who need to see the full context of how and where a contact was met.

Proposed Solution: A "Bulk Import Marketing Events" Tool I propose a new feature within the HubSpot Marketing Events tool that allows users to bulk import a list of marketing events via a CSV file. This would function similarly to the existing bulk contact, company, or deal import tool.

The import CSV file would include key event properties, such as:

• Event Name: (e.g., "Consensus 2024," "Fintech_Devcon_2023")

• Event Type: (e.g., "Conference," "Webinar," "Trade Show")

• Start Date / End Date: (Required for accurate historical tracking)

• Organizer: (e.g., "CoinDesk," "Fintech_Solutions_LLC")

• Location: (e.g., "Austin, TX")

• Marketing Channel: (e.g., "Trade Show," "Webinar")

• Campaign Association: (To link events to broader campaigns)

Examples of How This Would Work:

1. Preparation: A user would export a list of all historical events from a spreadsheet or internal database.

2. Import Process:

   • Navigate to the Marketing Events tool in HubSpot.

   • Click on a new "Import" button.

   • Upload the CSV file and map the columns to the corresponding HubSpot Marketing Event properties.

   • Run the import.

3. Contact Association: Once the events are created, you can then import the contact list for each event and, during the import process, select the associated marketing event. HubSpot would automatically link the contacts to the correct historical event.

Business Impact for Utila.io: For Utila.io, this feature would be a game-changer. Imagine attending a major crypto conference like "Consensus" or a fintech summit like "Money20/20." With this feature, a team member could:

• Import all of your past events from the last two years in one go.

• Retroactively associate thousands of contacts with the correct event and campaign.

• Run a report showing the exact number of qualified leads and deals sourced from each historical event.

• Finally, have a clear, data-driven answer to the question: "Was our presence at that 2023 conference worth the investment?"

This feature would save countless hours of manual data entry and unlock the ability to accurately measure the long-term ROI of marketing events, which is critical for making smart business decisions.

[Max_from_hapily]

Hey @sciox68,

Agreed on Marketing Events needing a bulk upload option.  I can understand why they havent implemented yet given that the marketing events objects up until recently has been more geared toward being a data store for 3rd party event apps to store registration/attendance data in.  There was a recent product update announced that lets you use a workflow action to register contacts for Marketing Events as well which might at LEAST knock down some of the time it takes for you to do the registration of the contact lists after the fact.  I agree though, It would be great to see the marketing event object behave more like regular records and bulk upload seems like a logical next step since they added that ability to manually create one at a time.

 👈 Knowning what we know about creating/associating registrant records to events in our own app, i'd imagine that this is the tough part that they are taking the time finding an elegant way to navigate before allowing a bulk upload of marketing event records.  Bulk asscociations across a number of records at once gets really scary really fast. 

Transparently, we've got a HubSpot app called event•hapily and we opt to install a custom object to keep track of events instead of the native Marketing Events object and this is just one of the many reasons.  We've got a lot of customers who bring us spreadsheets of past events they need to bulk upload, and since it's a custom object we can just import a list of events in bulk.  Which is a really common practice in onboarding since our customers generally have a number of previous events they want to load into HubSpot and create registrants for, on top of importing a number of future events our customers plan on running.  We also have some easy ways to bulk generate registrants that don't involve building a ton of workflows and slowly running through them one by one to manage it.

In your case, if you more so value the bulk uploading of event records, you could do something similar on your own if you have access to custom objects, you might consider using a custom object called "Events" instead of the Marketing Event object if you arent relying on any of the 3rd party integrations that auto-populate those Marketing Event Records.  And then you can bulk upload records, and then when you have your registrant lists, you could use the native association workflow actions in HubSpot to associate those contacts to your custom events object. 

This is where you could then do #3 on your list above.

You'd still have to do the associations of the registrants lists to the event one workflow at a time, but you are atleast saving a bunch of time on the creation of the event records themselves.  You'd also need to create a matching property on the event object AND the contact records before running the associaton workflow action, which isnt the worst thing ever its just a couple of extra steps.  Custom Objects are also more customizable than the marketing events object, which is extremely useful if you want to get really specific on the information/reports/layouts you want to see on your event objects.

We do the above in event•hapily by using our workflow action that would bulk register a list of contacts for a specific event OR if you want to do it without building a workflow you could find your registration list you important, and bulk edit a contact property we have that instantly creates registrants.

Either way, I'm sure this is coming to Marketing Events at some point.  In the grand scheme of things, the manual creation of marketing events is still a fairly newish thing, and if they don't have bulk upload YET, its likely because there is a good reason in the background and they are working on it.