You're most likely using Zoom as your webinar platform today. We don't blame you. For many people it's the logical choice as they're already using Zoom for their meetings. However, by choosing a platform specifically designed for webinars, it's possible to increase the ROI from your webinars, and save a lot of time doing tedious tasks like creating registration pages, setting up reminders and getting data into your CRM.
Before using Contrast, Rally was using Zoom to host their webinars. "Contrast has changed the way we run webinars. Before, we were just running webinars like anyone else. Now we understand the impact of our webinars, create more content than ever – and most important our attendees love our content."
That's what Lauren Gibson (head of content and community at Rally) told us during our interview for this case study. Rally is a company that's helps researchers easily scale their operations with a specialized user research CRM. They've been running their webinars for almost a year now on Contrast.
If you feel like you're running into the limitations of Zoom Webinars, then read on to discover how Rally has used Contrast and made webinars work for their bottom line. If you are curious how Contrast compares to Zoom on a feature-by-feature basis, then here's a link.
Why did you change from Zoom?
"Like many others, we started with Zoom because it's the tool we already use for meetings. Quickly we understood that Zoom has many limitations. For example, at Rally, we didn't think Zoom registration pages looked good enough. Let alone, making them look like our brand. So we decided to use Luma for our registration pages. Now our registration pages looked better, but it added complexity to our setup." Lauren tells us.
That meant that Rally had registrations happening on Luma, recordings were stored on YouTube, and webinar hosting was a completely separate headache to them. Each platform required a different login, had unique interfaces, and generated isolated data that never seemed to connect.
There are countless of these examples with Zoom. Asking your audience to download an app to watch your webinar? Contrast runs fully in the browser, for speakers and viewers too. Automatically added calendar invites added to reminder emails? Not on Zoom. But of course Contrast has thought of that, Lauren tells us.
"If you want to have a very easy, clean, professional looking webinar experience that's seamless for all parties, Contrast is the way to go. It's a low stress, low effort, high impact kind of tool."
Breaking point with Zoom
The pain was most acute during their monthly Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions. Attendees would struggle to join, sometimes arriving 5-10 minutes late just trying to navigate Zoom. Attendees would complain about poor video quality, confusing interfaces, and interrupted experiences. For a company priding itself on community engagement, these technical barriers were more than just an inconvenience - they were directly compromising our brand reputation.
Lauren remembers the constant anxiety of hosting. Would the recording work? Would guests be able to join smoothly? Would attendees have a good experience? Each webinar felt like navigating a minefield of potential technical failures. It reached a boiling point when her CEO - who was initially hosting the webinars - found the experience so overwhelming and decided they needed a better solution.
"I felt like I was spending more time setting things up than actually creating valuable content."
"If we wanted to take community building serious, we had to take our webinar platform serious. Somewhat of a coincidence, but a colleague attended a webinar on Contrast, he noticed how fluid the experience was – and branded! That's when we booked a demo with the team", Lauren remembers.
First impression: low effort, high impact
First impressions matter. And Lauren's first impression of Contrast was its simplicity. Where Zoom demanded complex setups and multiple tools, Contrast offered one simple to use tool for webinars. She could now manage registration, hosting, recording, and analytics from a single platform.
"Contrast has made our webinar strategy more scalable. It's easier to keep up, introduce new ideas, and stay focused on creating engaging content instead of wrestling with technical logistics."
"Most marketing teams like ours are busy", Lauren tells us. There's always something to work on, whether it's coordinating a new product launch, writing a blog post or planning next quarter. Every minute spend clicking around in a webinar tool, feels one too many. But at the same time, we think webinar products are complicated. So it becomes difficult to host more webinars, or make sure the data is in HubSpot.
Contrast creates a lot of templates, or great UX for repetitive tasks. For example, if you add a speaker to your webinar, that was on a webinar before, it will autocomplete all their information based on just their first name. The platform is full of little things like that – which end up saving you hours in just setting up and managing the webinar.
How we use Contrast at Rally today
Higher attendance rates thanks to Contrast
Great webinar platforms don't deliver on ease of use alone. In the end, it's the metrics and bottom-line that matters too. "Without a doubt, it is the ease of use that stands out when we're using Contrast. I'll easily save hours, that I can then invest in higher ROI tasks. Or making sure that the content of the webinar is going to be great." Lauren adds to that, that attendees have the same experience; they no longer need to download an app. They get calendar invites in their calendar app – and once they're in the webinar it's easy to engage with others.
"It's a low stress, low effort, high impact kind of tool"
Compared to Zoom, that means Rally has higher attendance rates. During the webinar, there's also more engagement between speakers and attendees. But also attendees themselves. Lauren tells us that "people chat more, ask more questions and most importantly engage with each other. The great thing about this, is that I know Contrast tracks all of that data and sends it to HubSpot, so that we can act on it once the webinar is over."
Impact of our webinars in HubSpot
Contrast's HubSpot integration became Rally's secret weapon. What used to be a manual, time-consuming process of tracking leads transformed into an automated system. Every webinar attendee, every poll response, every interaction becomes a potential sales touchpoint. The sales team can now see granular details - who attended multiple webinars, which topics generated most interest, how different segments engaged.
Lauren quickly realized that if they wanted to use their webinars for more than just sharing content – acting on them would be crucial. "Having the Contrast to HubSpot integration makes it easier for those our sales team to actually have valuable information," Lauren explains. No more manual CSV downloads or guesswork about attendee interactions.
That also ties in with the way Rally scores their leads in HubSpot. What once required complex manual tracking now happened automatically. "We can create lists of people who watched more than five webinars, viewed at least 20% of those webinars," Lauren notes. Thanks to all the data Contrast captures and sends in the form of properties and activity timelines, it helped us score our leads in a way that was previously impossible.
On top of that, the team at Rally has discovered the strength of using poll answers for lead scoring. "Populating polls into HubSpot has been huge for our sales team," Lauren shares. These organic interactions provided insights that traditional sales outreach could never capture—information freely given by potential customers.
How webinar insights can improve bottom line
With Contrast's HubSpot integration, everything changed:
- Leads now had rich, contextual information
- Sales could track webinar attendance patterns
- Polls provided organic lead intelligence
Quantifying the impact Lauren's team implemented a sophisticated tracking system: "We just set up this whole thing in HubSpot where we have marketing qualified leads, and each interaction is like a percentage point. And webinars are, a pretty decent chunk of that."
Rally's sales team now viewed Contrast as an "information goldmine". They could:
- See who attended multiple webinars
- Understand lead engagement patterns
- Craft more personalized outreach
"Since using Contrast, our sales team could finally use webinars for outreach."
Detailed analytics save us money
Before Contrast, data was fragmented and it was difficult to draw any real insights from the webinars Now, Lauren has a comprehensive view of her webinar performance.
Lauren explains that because of the granularity of the data in Contrast, they have changed the way their asses their webinars. "I'm not just looking at the number of people that register. I can see did people attend, how much did they watch of the webinar? For both the live webinar, and the replay I can literally see the how much of it they watched. That helps us understand if the content resonates with our audience. And of course the sales team uses that data post-webinar."
Lauren wasn't just counting attendees; she was understanding engagement patterns – and trying to understand what channels were working for Rally:
"UTM stuff has always been mildly confusing me. And I love how easy it is to UTMs in contrast."
Contrast simplified her tracking, by:
- Showing her how people find the webinar
- Help her understand what specific communities drove traffic
- Track performance down to an individual link
"I can now see, oh, I spend time posting to these communities. No one ever comes from them. No one clicks the link. Then I simply won't promote there again, and focus my attention elsewhere."
It's these kind of details, Lauren tells us that Contrast thinks about. They really understand the job of a marketer, and our struggles and frustrations with today's webinar platforms.
One click to repurpose a webinar
There's one more thing that I need to highlight, Lauren tell us. That's how easy it is to repurpose our webinars on Contrast. "We didn't expect this to be the case when we took the demo. Maybe also because we didn't really repurpose our webinars before."
The reason that Rally did not repurpose their webinars before is simply. Zoom has no repurposing features. Doing it yourself is time-consuming – and you often need another tool. Or worse, an agency to help you do that. Besides that, the quality of the recording on Zoom is not great. Especially when sharing a presentation, the speakers are barely visible.
On Contrast that's different, Lauren tell us. "Webinars are recorded in FullHD and there are different layouts to fit the content. So you decide if your face is visible, or not."
Contrast makes it possible to add questions from the audience, or poll results to the webinar itself. Our community loves this – and it typically become moments worth sharing in our newsletter or on social media.
Lauren had some experience with content repurposing before though. Unfortunately, with a familiar pain point many marketers know too well - the process of actually doing the repurposing yourself. And hiring an agency to help repurpose their webinars was simply not an option. That means we simply never got to repurpose our webinars. Frustrating, because we knew how much value was locked in there.
"I tried it once with the previous AMA to clip up my own videos and it was horrible," she recalled. "It took so much time. It was such a pain."
When Lauren discovered Contrast's repurposing features, it was like finding a magic wand for content creation. "I like that a whole hour of great content can genuinely be easily repurposed by me," she explained. Before I had to buy another tool (Otter) to transcribe the webinar and then transform it into new content. Now it's in-platform, with the click of a button.
With Zoom, webinar content essentially dies after the live event. Now, with Contrast's clip generation and transcription features, each webinar becomes a content factory. Since Rally has created a repurposing strategy, they quickly create LinkedIn posts, blog snippets, and social media content directly from the webinar recording.
Their monthly AMA series, which was already popular, became a strategic content engine. Lauren could now focus on creating engaging conversations instead of wrestling with technical logistics. Contrast's clean, professional interface meant guests felt comfortable, and attendees enjoyed a seamless experience.
Contrast's impact on marketing and sales
When we asked Lauren to share her view on what Contrast means for their marketing and sales strategy, she shared the following. "Contrast is my favorite webinar tool – and it is really really good at what it promises to do: help you run webinars. Because of the success with our AMA, we asked ourselves, can we run other types of events? That led is to now recurring demos that we've pre-recorded. They play automatically on a data and time – and to the audience they look like they're live."
"Contrast has made our webinar strategy more scalable. It's easier to keep up, introduce new ideas, and stay focused on creating engaging content instead of wrestling with technical logistics."
"For the sales team, this is yet another touchpoint in the prospect's journey. We see that prospects that attend webinars on Contrast activate at a much higher rate than the ones who don't", Lauren shares.
That gives Rally the confidence to expand into more diverse event formats and continue building our community, Lauren knows they've found more than just a webinar platform - they've found a growth catalyst.
Run webinars with impact
Do you want to show marketing's impact on the sales pipeline?
Contrast is the only webinar platform built specifically for HubSpot. With engagement features that ensure your audience engages, you'll always have you a CRM filled with data. Thanks to its repurposing features, a single webinar becomes a summary you can share with sales, a blog post and 3 clips for social media.
