10 Best Webinar Software you should consider in 2024 – No.1 is super cool
Webinars are taking the digital space by storm, but this didn’t start today. The pandemic outbreak triggered an increment in online users who were constantly seeking education and entertainment. Many SMEs and large corporations recognized this as an opportunity to channel more efforts into digital marketing strategies to generate revenue and avert the risk of becoming defunct.
One of the marketing strategies proven to yield substantial results is webinars. Studies show that 89% of hosts agreed that webinars are the best platform to showcase and grow their business.
In this post, you’ll learn the importance of webinars to your business and the best webinar platform you need to leverage to host successful webinars in 2024.
Why Should I Host a Webinar?
Asking why you should host a webinar is like asking, ‘Why does my car need gas?’ Knowing fully well that it is one of the crucial components that kickstarts the car. Without gasoline, your car cannot get you to your destination, regardless of the functionality of other components.
Apply this analogy to online promotion strategies. There is an end goal, which is to create awareness and generate revenue. To make this happen, you’ll have to utlize various media platforms and deploy marketing strategies are integrated to attain the goal. Alienating one approach would limit the possibility of having more significant results. So why overlook Webinars? When it’s got the potential to generate more revenue for you.
1. Global Reach
Webinars enable borderless interactions, which provide extended audience reach. The pandemic triggered massive reliance on digital communication which is a more cost-effective approach to hosting events, seminars, tradeshows, exhibitions, and conferences because these gatherings require heavy spending. In addition, attendees who live far from the event location might find it a challenge to commute far distances. You can achieve more while saving your resources, through webinars. With a computer powered by an internet connection, you can reach a mass audience, unrestricted by geographical location.
2. Value Exchange
Online users desire value in return for their time spent surfing the internet. Webinars are an excellent way to position your offerings as a value provider. Not to mention, webinars are a gateway to knowledge acquisition. By connecting industry leaders and holding panel discussions, attendees can gain helpful tips to improve their lifestyles. If your webinar generates revenue through ticket sales, it’s a win-win situation. The same goes for free webinars. Attendees pay with their time by registering, fixing the date on their calendar, and streaming your webinar instead of engaging in other activities.
3. Lead Generation and Contact Management
The goal of marketing and sales professionals is to turn leads into loyal customers. First, you need to generate the leads organically. One of the best ways to make this happen is to create a landing page where they can easily convert to an offering and get into your content campaigns.InEvent’s integration with HubSpot and Marketo allows for the speedy end-to-end transfer of lead data from the CRM to the InEvent webinar solution. In the registration process, leads may be propelled to check out your blogs and services on your landing pages, generating online traffic to your website.
4. Network Building
Webinars are highly effective for connecting people of diverse backgrounds and helping them grow their professional network. Modern webinar technology like InEvent provides numerous networking and engagement solutions to create seamless interactions.
How to choose a Webinar Software
Now that you know the value webinars can offer to your business, you need to choose a suitable platform for your webinars. Webinars are a significant investment, and you need to ensure that you are getting value in return. Think of this as buying a house. Before you purchase a home, you want to make sure that it’s situated in a safe environment, not far from your workplace, aesthetically pleasing, and the house agents are reliable, among other factors. Choosing a webinar platform follows a similar process. You need to ensure that you have a checklist containing the following criteria:
Free Demos
Who doesn’t love freebies? It is a great way to explore a product and test its compatibility with your brand. Reading ‘excellent’ reviews about the product is great but seeing is believing. The same goes for buying a house; you’ll need to physically inspect it before purchasing it. Many webinar software functions on a subscription model; it is, therefore, necessary that a free demo is available for first-time users.
High-end audio-video quality
You can work extremely hard with your promotion strategies and pull together the most influential speakers for your webinars; if the production value for your webinar is mediocre, then your overall webinar quality is compromised. Blurry and pixelated images aren’t visually appealing. You need a platform with professional audio-video strategies that are easily navigable by attendees who aren’t tech-savvy. InEvent webinars possess high-definition pictures and sound quality.
Ease of Access
You can’t know for a certain how your attendees will stream your content. And so, you have to ensure that your webinar can be easily accessed. It will be inconvenient for attendees to download a software first before thry attend the webinar. It’ll be more comfortable to stream directly from a web browser. InEvent prioritizes ease of access. With InEvent, you can rest assured that your webinars will be optimized for streaming via mobile apps, tablets, Android, and Apple devices. Speakers can dial into sessions as well.
On-demand Streaming
Recording your live webinars and converting them to shareable links is a great way to generate leads for a long time. You need to check if your chosen webinar software has allowed for recording; if so, what are the recording duration and storage capacity. The best webinar software should possess an in-built user-friendly recorder with ample storage space and the option to download.
InEvent webinars possess these features and more. All the recordings and other multimedia files are hosted on the cloud, so you need not worry about running out of storage space. Also, you can easily turn it into an on-demand content and have it permanently available to your audience.
Engagement features
Attendees don’t want to stream your webinar for hours without engaging with the speaker, hence the need for engaging experiences. After all, people get to network at in-person events. Your webinar should provide similar networking opportunities for attendees. It would be best to look out for the basic tools like chats, questions, and polls that can help you obtain feedback in real-time. Suppose you want to go beyond your engagement strategies. In that case, you need a platform that provides additional solutions for networking activities like breakout rooms features and 1:1 video chat sessions..
Responsiveness of Customer Support Team
If it’s your first time using a webinar solution, you will need to be educated on how it works. That’s the work of the support team. They also come in handy when there are technical difficulties and bugs to be fixed. It is the support team’s responsibilityto be responsive to your challenges and ensure your attendees have a seamless streaming experience. Ensure that you are in direct contact with a readily available person for support and not just a chatbot or email support. InEvent offers 24/7 live support for all clients in “x” many languages.
Compliance with Data Security Standards
You need to investigate the security measures attached to registrations and access to the webinars. Security doesn’t only apply to events but webinars as well. People with unauthorized access shouldn’t be granted access to the session. There are ways to avoid this mishap. You need to check if the webinar platform has double encryption and single sign-on features. In addition to possessing single sign-on features, InEvent allows organizers to edit permission levels for hosts, admin, and attendees. This is an excellent way to spot names that are not registered on the list. It’s numerous data security badges and credentials, qualifies it as a trustworthy webinar platform.
All-in-one Toolbox
An all-in-one webinar software contains all the necessary features to host a webinar successfully. It’s better to have all your A/V strategies, communication channels, CRMs, and sales channels in one platform for faster and more efficient production, than to outsource all your tools externally. InEvent webinars offer integrations with HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, Inteprefy, Zapier, and built-insocial media feeds and landing pages.
Top 10 webinar software you should use in 2022
With your checklist set up, you’re now better positioned to choose a suitable platform for your webinars.
1. InEvent
InEvent is the only platform that allows collaborative real time video editing while streaming and also make TV-like experiences accessbile to all users with an easy drag-and-drop interface. In addition, it offers a white-label, user-friendly platform with tools to assist you with all aspects of your events and webinars, from pre-production to post-production.
You may use InEvent to form the totality of your brand marketing communication, centralize every segment of attendees, promote live brand activations, and create virtual interactions to optimize your audience’s engagement. InEvent can help you turn your ideas into reality and promote the most professional events and webinars you could imagine.
The brand is well-trusted by many global companies such as Coca-Cola, Amazon, Santander, Bosch, Bayer, Sony Electronics, KPMG, Honda, DuPont, Eli Lilly, and Carrefour, Stefanini. InEvent is spotlighted as the ‘Future of Enterprise Broadcast,’ and that’s why A/V professionals and enterprises are monetizing through its dynamic solutions.
2. On24
ON24 is a cloud-based webinar and virtual event platform that helps businesses engage their audiences through data-rich digital experiences. The ON24 Digital Experience Platform makes engaging experiences that produce scalable development.
3. Livestorm
Livestorm is an end-to-end video engagement platform that allows businesses to grow professional on-demand, live, or pre-recorded events. Polling, Q&A sessions, and the usage of up-votes are all part of Livestorm’s consumer interaction strategy.
4. Demio
Demio makes it simple for marketing and customer-education teams to grow their live video operations in less time than ever before. The software is the ideal platform for generating and qualifying leads/customers, activating users, increasing trial conversions, educating customers, and reducing churn.
5. EverWebinar
EverWebinar provides consumers with a fully automated simulation of a live webinar experience. They enable video communications that are synonymous to live interactions. EverWebinar allows you to broadcast a pre-recorded webinar that seems and feels like a live recording; this appears to be an effective marketing tactic since the perceived exclusivity of a webinar is likely to bring you more highly-converting prospects have signed up to attend your event at a particular time.
6. Riverside
Riverside makes it simple to record remote podcasts and video interviews that look and sound like they were shot in a professional studio. It is well on its way to becoming the go-to content development platform. Software for recording webinars.
7. Livestream
Vimeo Livestream offers products and services to broadcasters worldwide for them to live to stream their events. Livestream, a Vimeo business, provides event organizers with a comprehensive collection of hardware and software capabilities for sharing their events with a growing online community.
8. Zoom
Zoom is a popular webinar software on the market today, connecting friends and colleagues from all over the world across time zones. It handles all of your communication needs, including meetings, chat, phone, webinars, conference room systems, and online events. Zoom is a trustworthy video platform that provides a high-quality experience that is simple to manage, utilize, and personalize.
9. GoToWebinar
GoToWebinar has been extant since the inception of webinars. While it is not the best webinar platform these days in terms of efficacy, it is still one of the most popular, with over 2.8 million webinars hosted each year. Many typical cloud-based webinar platform features are available with GoToWebinar, including HD video, automated recording, live chat, polls and surveys, live Q&A, file sharing, pre-recorded events, automatic invites, and follow-up emails, and sophisticated reporting and analytics.
10. WebinarNinja
WebinarNinja allows you to design, host, and distribute webinars. It is a browser-based, all-in-one webinar solution that helps trainers and producers increase and keep consumers through webinars. WbinarNinja allows you to host live, automated, series, paid, and hybrid webinars. WebinarNinja includes pre-built landing pages, email sequences, slide templates, and excellent engagement features.
Conclusion
It’s now time for you to decide on the suitable webinar platform for your business., knowing fully well that this decision can either help you achieve your desired results or do the exact opposite. With this guide, you can make an informed choice to transform your communication strategies into engaging broadcast streams. InEvent is the future of enterprise broadcasts. Explore its dynamic A/V solutions and give yourself a nice pat on the back later for making the right choice. Without further ado, begin with an active subscription!
About the Author / Sara Emezi
