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Webinar Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
- » What is the meaning of a webinar?
- » What is webinar software?
- » How does a webinar software work?
- » Is it worth investing money in a webinar software?
- » What are the features of a Webinar Software?
- » What are the benefits of a webinar software?
- » Key factors to consider before choosing a Webinar Software
- » How to choose a good Webinar Software?
- » Questions to ask a vendor when buying Webinar Software
- » How much does webinar software cost?
- » Webinar Statistics
- » Conclusion
Hosting a webinar is a perfect start towards generating qualified leads - holding customers back and representing brand values persuasively. If you create an interesting session using an end-to-end webinar solution, your business can save a lot of money and time. It can also help you engage your audience and identify potential leads better. However, it’s difficult to host a hassle-free webinar when it involves live Q&As, online workshops, and simultaneous video broadcast on multiple social media platforms. That’s where the need for cutting-edge webinar software comes into the picture. In order to select the best webinar software, you must have the knowledge on how to run a background check for the same.
» What is the meaning of a webinar?
A webinar is nothing but a seminar taking place online, in real-time. Webinars are live educational presentations conducted online by one or multiple hosts to educate audiences about their business/organization/learning programs. Since it is online, anyone from anywhere can join in. Plus, it also allows audiences to ask questions or chat with the webinar hosts in real-time.
» What is webinar software?
It is a software application that helps you to transform your online meetings into engaging experiences, bringing fruitful results both for you and your attendees. You don’t need to hassle for carrying out the pre-webinar set-ups as the software will do that for you through various webinar tools. All you have to do is to select a date and time, and the software will walk you through the rest of the formalities with ease.
» How does a webinar software work?
Webinar app guides you for hosting an online event with various tools and third-party applications. It comes with webinar templates with settings, to adjust them as per your preferences. The custom webinar invitation templates ease your task of inviting attendees by creating registration pages, and running follow-ups through automated email reminders. You can easily add your brand colors, logo and images in order to make the invitation page appealing to the recipients. However, the best webinar platform is the one that empowers you to keep your participants constantly engaged through various polls and surveys.
» Is it worth investing money in a webinar software?
Unless you have a dedicated team of your own, every time you host a webinar, you will have to pay freelancers to do all the things that are needed to hold a good webinar session. That comes at a cost. Big cost. With that being said, you can now imagine the level of hassles you are avoiding by not depending on any developer or designer for creating check-in pages for your webinar. To give you a rough estimate, you can save up to 30% to 40% of the total budget spent on freelancers. It clears the air whether or not businesses holding multiple weekly webinars should go for a webinar software or not.
» What are the features of a Webinar Software?
Webinar software comes with many features to make your digital meetings worth your time and effort. Let’s have a look at them in a bit more detail.
› Easy Customization Tools
Webinar software allows users to design webinars according to their preferences through its easy-to-use tools. It helps in changing theme colors, adding logos, customizing invitations, setting reminder emails, and so on. Therefore, the overall professional image of your webinar gets an impactful impression by adding a unique, personalized feel to the presentation.
› Uploading Handouts
Handouts serve as a free promotional teaser of your product or service to be launched. It intrigues excitement among your target audience, thereby creating a perfect buzz for your product - way ahead of its launch into the market. Webinar software can upload that during meetings so that your audience can have a look at what you have to offer them. Nowadays, many companies are also attaching special rewards along with the handouts in the webinar software, to ensure that your audience shows up right on time..
› Polls and Surveys
Polls and surveys outsmart almost all the alternatives when it comes to gathering useful data for formulating effective marketing strategies. Using the software, you can conduct a poll or survey to quickly gain insights about your products or services from the participants. These insights can be used for further improvements.
› Centralized Storage
In an effort to tackle theft or mutilation, all webinar platforms store the gathered data and reports in a single server. Moreover, it allows employees to easily retrieve files as required without any performance issues. They offer better protection against forceful intrusion into the company servers.
› Recording Facilities
This is one of the most recent features that have found its place in webinar platforms, especially for participants who miss out the meetings. The software automatically records all the information shared in the webinar session - both audio and video, and stores them for future use. In case someone wants to go through the webinar details, then he or she can easily access through a channel of permission from the administration.
› Screen Sharing Facilities
Recent webinar platforms provide screen sharing facilities. It enables the webinar host to share screen with the participants simultaneously during the presentation. This helps enhance customer participation and engagement, as they get a better hold on the subject.
» What are the benefits of a webinar software?
Subscribing to a webinar application for your organization will indeed be the right decision as it certainly helps in instilling trust in the relationship between you and your potential customers. Here are some of the standard features that you will find in most webinar software.
› Helps in branding
Hosting a webinar can help you to showcase your business potential, technical knowledge, expertise on products and services to clients with a great deal of professionalism. Apart from providing information to the audience, it also helps in expanding the company’s reach. This enhances your brand value in the global market. Moreover, it also allows other companies to understand your potential, which may also result in acquiring new business deals, partnerships, and more opportunities.
› Helps to easily Identify pain Points of the Customers
Understanding the pain points of your customers goes a long way in developing better products. The software tracks customer orientation and behaviour, tracks the total time spent on product pages and examines the purchase history. Thereby, using a webinar app, you can effectively target your audience group and work on any loopholes efficiently.
› Make Webinars re-accessible
You can record every minute of details through a webinar app so that absent participants won’t feel left out. As previously stated, it automatically records and stores data in the company’s server for future reference. These data can then be used to publish Ebooks, blog post series, or can be shared as video clips on platforms like YouTube or DailyMotion for the audience to gain stay in the know.
› Helps in Collecting Lead data
As the webinar app requires participants to log in or sign up by providing their information such as name, address, or contact details, you get data which can be later used for shaping your marketing efforts. To turn a regular visitor to a potential lead, that data can travel from your server to your sales department.
› Does Not Add to Expenses
The complete course of action takes place online, a great deal of money is saved, as contrast to face-to-face interviews or physical presentations at client’s premises. Moreover, you save on the travel expenses or audience charges to participate in the webinar. Hence, it effectively tackles financial demands for both the clients as well as the participants.
› Increase the Traffic flow
Apart from executing the regular tasks, the software is also capable of attracting a major audience from various social media platforms. The companies can post their webinar stories or share links of their webinars on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Reddit to boost the number of visitors and attendees.
» Key factors to consider before choosing a Webinar Software
More often than not, you only come to know about the flaws and loopholes in a webinar software once you start using it. If you are a buyer, who is sticking to a webinar software because you are tied with it until the subscription ends, it can be an unpleasant drag. However, there are some important points worth considering before zeroing upon webinar software. This will help you save your money from getting wasted into one that is not suited for your needs. Therefore, to help you with choosing the right webinar software, we have picked some of the key points which will help in your decision-making process.
› The Necessity of the Software
Imagine that you have subscribed to a high-end webinar tool, but you don’t know how to best utilize it for creating impactful webinars. This will indeed be a troublesome situation. Also, several organizations simply go with the trend and subscribe to webinar software without even assessing whether or not they need it. As a result, it only adds to their expenses rather than helping their business grow.
› Budget Estimation
Depending on the array of features the webinar software provides, each software is priced differently. Some come with a much affordable subscription fee billed every six months, while others come with a heavy monthly fee.. Therefore, unless you have a pre-definite budget that your company wants to spend monthly or annually, you may end up subscribing to a package by losing yourself to the vendor’s marketing gimmick.
› Analyzing the Requirements
Some need webinar software which excels in offering proactive sessions, while some prefer the ones providing real-time analytics and reporting features. The point is that requirements vary from company to company, and so are the price models. So, keep your list of required features ready before initiating the talk with any vendor. This helps in narrowing down the long list of vendors to a handful of candidates. As a result, you increase the chances of selecting webinar software that can give you a better result on your investments.
» How to choose a good Webinar Software?
The global market comprises several vendors who self-claim to be the best webinar software. However, there are very few amongst them whose claim is genuine. You can easily separate the wheat from the chaff. We have compiled a list of judging criteria that you can use while selecting the one that is the best webinar software for your needs. Let’s check them out.
› Easy-to-use Interface
The best webinar platforms provide customers a seamless experience for quickly creating frequent webinar sessions. Being user-friendly, they eradicate the picture of hiring technical people to do the daily chores. Hence, anyone and everyone can work on the software, regardless of their educational qualification and technical understanding.
› Integration with Existing Tools
Another feature which should be present in the webinar platform that you choose is its compatibility with your existing business tools. This is because it is possible that your marketing tools are not compatible with the webinar software that you are seriously considering. Make sure to ask about compatible integration possibilities with your vendor beforehand.
› Safety against Attackers
Every business has its own set of confidential information, which is required to be kept secured from potential attackers, theft or mutilation. Therefore, several webinar tools have enabled two-factor authentication processes, activated firewall systems, single sign-in options, and many other safety measures to make the software strong against unethical hacking attempts. Apart from protecting the information, it also helps in avoiding forceful intrusions and unauthorized entries.
› Secure backup to lost files
In case of an unavoidable circumstance, an efficient back-up system can help in recovering essential documents, audio and video clips. Thus, it is always recommended to look for software that provides reliable back-up facilities.
› Customer satisfaction
Though it is an old school trick it works every time. The reviews left by the current and past customers on various review sites can help you know how the software actually scores on the service quality and customer satisfaction parameters.
» Questions to ask a vendor when buying Webinar Software
1. What options are available in terms of webinar branding?
2. What features are unique to your webinar software, and how are they different from the other providers in the market?
3. Will the software make all my webinars easily accessible across devices and browsers?
4. What kind of security measures does the solution employ?
5. Can I restrict and define access on my own?
6. Does the software allow archiving webinars?
7. Do you offer thorough training sessions? Are there extra charges for it?
8. Will you personalize the product as per my needs?
9. What type of audio and video options does the system offer in a live setup?
10. Can I record the webinars? What functions do I need to use for that?
11. Does the solution offer social media integration?
12. Do you offer lead generation?
13. How does the process of joining a live webinar look like for registered users?
14. Does the software include Q&A, chats, polls, and other options to keep the attendees engaged?
15. Can I send reminders or follow-up emails through the system?
16. What kind of mechanism is in place to let attendees pay online while registering?
17. What is your future roadmap for your product?
18. Does your product allow hassle-free integrations with third-party systems?
19. What type of webinar analytics and reporting can I expect?
20. Can you elaborate on your ongoing support services?
21. What is the detailed cost structure of the product?
» How much does webinar software cost?
The pricing of webinar platforms differ based on the facilities and tools they provide, the total number of users assigned, and the period of subscription, amongst others. While the lowest pricing structure starts from $8/month, the highest one can reach up to $199/month. However, it is recommended to subscribe to the free, basic version initially. This way, you can assess if the software successfully stands out on its promises or not. Moreover, it also helps in understanding the facilities more profoundly, and enables you to decide whether to go with it in the future or not.
» Webinar Statistics
- By 2023, the webcast and webinar market is projected to hit $800 million by recording a CAGR of 7.6% globally between the forecast duration of 2016 to 2023. [Research Nester]
- The most successful webinars begin promotions at least 15 days ahead of the event. [ON24]
- A minimum of 57% of marketers host 50 or more webinars in a year. [Zippia]
- Out of all the webinars, 61% are hosted by B2B organizations. [CloudIncome]
- 78% of webinars record 50 or fewer attendees. [GoTo]
- The average conversion rate of a webinar is 55%. [ON24]
- 58% of B2B marketers tend to leverage webinars as their reliable promotional tool. [Content Marketing Institute]
- 44% of attendees prefer webinars to run for a maximum of 45 minutes. [BigMarker]
- The average duration of a webinar is 39 - 60 minutes. [BrightTALK]
- The best time to host a webinar is midweek - before or after the lunch hour. [LiveWebinar]
- 93% of people attend webinars from their computers. [MegaMeeting]
Thursday is the best day for promoting a webinar, as per statistics. [SmartInsights]
» Conclusion
Now that you have fully understood about webinar software, choosing an ideal one would be easier. However, it is suggested not to judge the software quality from price, instead, try and acknowledge its potential. Otherwise, you may find yourself lost in the spam of not-so-good webinar platforms.