It helps you engage with your audience, understand their pain points and concerns, and offer a better solution to them. This, in turn, helps you generate more leads and grow your business with a deeper and long-lasting impact of your brand on the audience. But there are lots of challenges in hosting webinars seamlessly. It may be due to poor network connection, way too limited features on general video conferencing platforms, difficulty measuring performance, and many more. And there are lots of scenarios where people forget to record the video and regret it later. The straightforward solution to this problem is webinar software. It combines video conferencing features with marketing automation to bring you great results in terms of branding, the number of leads, higher engagement, and better revenue. But,
What is a Webinar?
In simple words, Webinar = Online seminar You might have gone to one of those physically held seminars where a lecture, workshop, or presentation was being conducted, or at least heard about them. These seminars are often business-related and are organized to share ideas, knowledge, and updates around a certain topic. The same type of events are now conducted online, and that’s what we call webinars. The word ‘webinar’ is derived from two words, ‘web’ and ‘seminar’. And I’m sure you now know the reason why!
What are the Benefits of Conducting a Webinar?
Businesses, marketers, and solopreneurs host webinars these days extensively. It’s done to establish and nurture relationships with your target audience and build authority around your brand. After you have showcased your credibility, you can also use webinars to promote your products and/or services that your audience is likely to benefit from. Here are a few of its benefits:
Increased convenience
Unlike physical webinars, people don’t need to travel long distances and spend their money to attend a seminar. All you need is a laptop, mobile, or Smart TV with an internet connection to join a webinar. It is convenient, economical, and manageable for both the attendees and the organizers. And the best thing is you can invite anyone from anywhere across the globe, no matter 100 or 50k in number.
Helps position you as an expert
When you talk about your area of expertise and help people with difficulties, you are positioning yourself as an expert and thought leader in the space. More and more people will listen to you if your content helps them solve their problems.
Better audience engagement
Conducting webinars consistently and delivering value keeps your audience engaged. It also prevents them from moving on to other brands as competition is getting tighter these days. You can share interesting content, ask questions in between, and perform quick surveys and polls using webinar software to keep them engaged.
Helps generate more leads
A webinar is a great marketing strategy that influences your audience deeply with your face on it. They start trusting you, and eventually, your product or services. You can get more registrations and land people on your landing page to generate more high-quality leads. All these benefits are key factors in growing your business. So, let’s look at some of the best webinar software for your business and understand why webinars are such a big trend these days.
Demio
Organize webinars effectively using Demio without troubling yourself with loads of background work. It provides you with a simple and no-download webinar conducting experience while leveraging modern marketing tools and increasing your webinar attendance rates. Demio is designed to grow your business and help you bring your brand to the front using your logo and customizable pages in webinar rooms. Manage everything in one place like automated and live webinars, replays, registration pages, and more. Demio provides you with essential tools for creating a seamless registration process, capturing registrations, and marketing the event. You get an intuitive and clean room directly using your browser with screen sharing, HD streaming, presentation slides, video sharing from Demio directly, and more. Remind your registrants automatically regarding the upcoming sessions using customizable notifications via emails. Drive better results with flexible HD recordings and replay pages. Enhance engagement by asking questions, chats, interactive polls, call-to-actions, and sharing bonuses, gifts, and handouts, enabling the audience to download them. Demio allows you to manage Q&A sessions easily with dedicated functionalities. You can switch between public to private chat at any time to start conversations. Let your audience interact through @mentions and emojis, along with webcam or microphone permissions. You can also measure your webinars’ effectiveness through actionable, in-depth analytics. Schedule any webinars such as live, automated, series, on-demand, and hybrid. It supports multiple devices and browsers, including Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc. Integrate Demio easily with tools like Mailchimp, Drip, ConvertKit, Ontraport, Zapier, and more.
LiveWebinar
The advanced platform of LiveWebinar is tailor-made to meet the demands of your business. It facilitates easy browser access, lets you create a unique webinar experience, and has the freedom to add/remove features as you want. LiveWebinar is built using state-of-the-art technologies and connection quality with clear HD videos, so you and the attendees don’t feel any trouble during your webinar. LiveWebinar is easily embeddable on your website using easy and quick integration options. Whether it is branding customizations, engagement analytics, or social media broadcasting, LiveWebinar excels in all fields. It empowers thousands of business leaders and entrepreneurs worldwide to conduct smooth webinars with marketing automation, toll-free numbers, and advanced API integration. It works seamlessly with any device, including mobiles, PCs, and Smart TVs. Organize webinars, sales presentations, meetings, and training in different formats. You can record them and share in HD and use a virtual whiteboard to write, draw, and explain your thoughts. They have 42+ data centers with over 99% availability and resilient infrastructure. Conduct live streaming and share them on social media. Improve your numbers using advanced reports, tracking, and analytics. Integrate it with CRMs and automation tools like Mailchimp, Moodle, ActiveCampaign, AWeber, Zapier, HubSpot, and more.
ClickMeeting
ClickMeeting helps streamline your webinar events, video conferencing, and online meetings to bring together your team members, customers, and students. You can easily showcase your services and products, demos, and marketing materials to improve your selling chances. Share knowledge with your community and teach students online through training sessions and courses easily from anywhere. ClickMeeting helps you run all your projects and events smoothly, collaborate with people, and conduct business meetings online to grow your business. This platform provides you with an easy scaling up of webinars to reach people in thousands across the globe. Apart from screen sharing, use web conferencing, new room, streaming on YouTube or Facebook, audio and video, whiteboard, presentation, polls, and surveys moderated Q&A, chat translations, different event types, and more. Record your webinars and conduct tests and surveys to keep the event engaging. Get started with ClickMeeting within a few moments and start customizing your webinar room to make an impeccable first impression that attracts a larger audience. Leverage paid webinars, subaccounts, automated webinars, virtual events, multi-user features, address book, profile page, waiting room, customizable invitations and registration page, custom branding, and useful add-ons. Derive useful trends and predictions by analyzing your webinars with statistics, performance ratings, thank you page, and utilizing social media sharing.
Adobe Connect
The simple and modern webinar tool of Adobe Connect is an awesome option to have a better webinar experience, enhanced host controls, and better accessibility. It enables you to tell your stories without interruptions with its versatile stage to deliver stellar performances before your audience. You can use pods to design a customized virtual storyboard inside your webinar rooms by adding names and positions. You can guide your attendees’ visual attention anywhere you want using images, interactive courses, multimedia, polls, chats, notes, and quizzes. Customize your rooms with your brand elements and the theme of your story. Use templates to design your webinar and reuse it to save your time. Use drawing and annotations using the virtual whiteboard; sidebar to increase presenter capabilities; split the main classroom into smaller rooms, and run multiple chats to enhance engagement. Adobe supports multidimensional polls like multichoice, open-ended short answers, and multi-answers. They facilitate moderated Q&As and allow you to pause your webcam in case you need it. You can also use virtual backstage to collaborate effectively with multiple hosts and presenters. Other features included are prepared mode, engagement dashboards, and support for descriptive audio and embedded MP4 subtitles to include a broader audience. In addition to this, use a cloud content library to share a document, leverage email promotions, reminders, confirmations; custom exports; and event analytics. And don’t worry; all your data is secured in the tight infrastructure of Adobe.
GoToWebinar
Feel more empowered and confident to tell your story with GoToWebinar. It is already used by 50k+ customers and hosts about 2.7 million webinars every year. It helps you reach out to more people, build your brand, and grow your business. This tool is great for marketers for effective and easy demand generation and drives their business leads. Corporate trainers and customer service teams can also utilize it for delivering an engaging learning experience online. Even internal communicators trust GoToWebinar to conduct hassle-free-all-hands online meetings to inspire and inform their employees. It reduces the trouble of conducting webinars no matter what your skill level or goal is. GoToWebinar streamlines all the activities from preparing to presenting a webinar in a few steps. The platform is packed with useful features and a simple interface where you need to select the event date, and they will help you walk through how it works. You can manage events by viewing them and adjusting the settings, and set up live events, on-demand, or series webinars with the help of its flexible scheduling. You can use webinar templates from previous webinars and tweak them a bit to create a new event and save time. Promote your webinars using their custom webinar registration page, automated reminders via emails, and invitations. Showcase your brand with pride using your logo, brand colors, and related images to the webinar pages. Use the engagement dashboard to monitor the attendees, the time elapsed, and hands raised. Leverage presenter webcams to present yourself and the panelists before the attendees. You can even create surveys and polls to keep your audience engaged. Record your events and reuse them to increase viewer counts. Utilize CRM integrations and other marketing automation system integrations to transfer attendee information, so you are informed about who you are addressing and enhance the likelihood of fruitful next steps. Generate detailed reports on attendees, their level of interest, questions asked and answered during the webinar, and more. You can download the reports with useful metrics and find which channels brought more webinar signups. You can also integrate GoToWebinar with tools like Marketo, Unbounce, Zapier, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and more.
Zoho Meeting
Educate and influence your audience globally using the webinar software by Zoho. It helps you engage with them easily to spread goodwill and awareness, conduct classes online, onboard employees, market products and/or services, or collaborate with professionals in your domain. Organizing a webinar is easy with Zoho Meeting using where you can schedule it for once and then set it to repeat based on the chosen schedule through the Recurring webinar feature. You have the option to keep your audience engaged with video conferencing and screen sharing. Add guest speakers or colleagues as co-organizers to your webinars. It will allow them to co-host presentations, launch polls, answer questions, permit attendees to speak, and record the ongoing webinar. Zoho Meeting allows you to promote your brand by including the logo and company name on the registration forms and customizing the questions and fields to collect attendees’ insightful data. You can also customize the design and content of the invitations, follow-up emails, and registration confirmations. Send reminders easily before the webinar starts, and promote the webinars online on social media, blogs, or web pages by embedding the links or registration forms. Moderate attendees by managing them like a pro; approve, cancel, or deny registrations and filter the quality audience. As a result, you can restrict spammers from attending your webinar in addition to those who fail to meet the prerequisites, such as making payments, completing surveys, etc. Use their webinar recorder and keep it on the cloud to record, share, and replay your webinar recording online. You can even download it to use offline. Zoho Meeting, video, and audio are fully secure using strong DTLS-SRTP encryption. In case of low internet connection, use their toll-free and dial-in numbers to join webinars. It can accept attendees from over 100 countries. Decrease your audience’s hassles and enable them to join your webinar straight from the browser they use. Sent important links and messages to the attendees using the Broadcast message feature. You can even answer questions in private mode or display them to all the attendees. Zoho also empowers with the Raise Hand feature so the attendees can grab the presenter’s attention and get their questions answered. At the end of the webinar, let the audience take a certain action by directing them to a thank-you page, website, survey link, feedback form, etc. Analyze your webinar’s performance with the help of detailed reports in CSV and XLS formats. Download these reports for registrants with their email address, country, registration time, participation status, etc.
Zoom
There has been an abrupt increase in the number of Zoom users these days. It is quite famous for video calls, but it is great for webinars as well. It helps you humanize your interactions with a large pool audience. You can proudly bring your presenters to the front & center during the webinar to create a better impact, instead of just the presentation slides. You can connect with external and internal audiences alike by sharing a live HD video. Zoom allows you to use virtual backgrounds, background noise suppression, and studio effects to provide the best-in-class sound and display quality. Get a fully controlled environment by minimizing audience interruptions. You can scale for up to 50k people securely and reliably in your webinar. In addition to this, grow your audience externally by live-streaming the event on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and other customized streaming services. For brand promotion, Zoom lets you customize your reminder emails and registration page, promote social sharing, watermark your live streaming video with your brand, and help you build your landing page post-webinar. Keep your audience motivated and give them ample reasons to stay with you through engaging Q&A sessions and hand raises, allow them to use video or audio and stand out, and collect their feedback using an automatic survey after the webinar. Gather the registrants’ contact details, nurture them with marketing automation, push them as leads and feed their details into your CRM, and monetize the webinars with paid registration. Measure the event success with a full webinar report, and audience engagement, analyze your Q&A sessions along with surveys and polls, and export data into CSV format. Plan your webinars with the help of a Zoom expert and create a webinar. Rehearse before the event by leveraging best practice knowledge of Zoom. Don’t worry if anything goes wrong because it offers dedicated support for live events and moderation and monitoring. For additional services, integrate Zoom with Marketo, HubSpot, PayPal, Zapier, Salesforce, Eventbrite, and more.
BigMarker
Hosting webinars that can inspire your audience to take profitable actions is easy with BigMarker. This unique webinar software emphasizes your content, which your audience cares about, and is built to satisfy larger audience demands for training and marketing. Choose from multiple formats; you can stream in using RTMP or use their studio, and host events live or schedule and pre-record them. You get enterprise-level reliability with advanced features, up to 50k attendees, and top-class security to reap better profits. BigMarker offers a full end-to-end video and webinar hosting solution, unlike others. It supports unlimited live, automated, on-demand, and recurring webinars. You get 15+ landing page templates to choose from with branding elements and customizations. Send customized emails and automate them easily. BigMarker is reliable across devices such as Mac, iOS, PC, and Android. It runs on the cloud and provides common yet powerful engagement tools such as Q&A with upvoting, quizzes and polls, hand-outs, display offers, public and private chat, and inviting attendees on-screen. BigMarker allows a maximum of 9 presenters simultaneously on HD video and audio streaming. Other features included in it are HD screen-sharing, up to 5k attendees, customizing theme color and logo, and webinar recordings with on-demand availability. You can play MP4 or YouTube videos during webinars, control them as you like, and present files seamlessly inside your webinar room. Highlight important points and mark-up presentations using a whiteboard, and let your presenters and attendees use dial-in in your webinars. You can embed webinar registration forms, on-demand videos, and live webinars easily on your website, trigger product pop-ups, and push the audience to take action. Analyze performance with powerful analytics using detailed, easy-to-understand reports. Apart from all these, you can host Twitter chats and do YouTube or Facebook Live.
Livestorm
Have a memorable webinar experience with Livestorm and host an unlimited number of webinars in HD. It enables easy chat during webinars so you can gather quick feedback from the attendees. Start sharing your entire screen in HD with a click of a button. Livestorm works in your browser with no restriction on the number of attendees, whether they use their desktop or mobile, top-class performance is assured with Livestorm. It is easy to personalize and customize based on your special needs so you can leverage your webinar for lead generation, selling your product or services, and more. Scale your training using automated features, and engage with your clients through live onboarding. Record and host online courses while keeping your students engaged with questions and polls—record live interviews remotely for panel discussions and podcasts. Use Livestorm to do live events, and live Q&A to build your authority and expertise within your niche while building your community fueled with real-time discussions. You can also use Livestorm to host a grand employee onboarding session in addition to training new members in your team. Furthermore, this platform can also be used by HRs to scale their remote recruiting processes and boost interaction with candidates.
BlueJeans
Host interactive and engaging webinars with the help of BlueJeans. Expand your webinar reach to anywhere with easy and flexible streaming options to/from any device. You can moderate and manage each webinar’s angle via a virtual dashboard and take complete control of it. Stimulate brand and product interest using the power of collective participation, interactive video, and superb connectivity. Use rich multimedia documents and content to boost brand recognition and captivate your attendees. You can share on-demand or broadcast live webinars with up to 150 presenters with HD videos that you can also record later. Integrate your webinar with streaming partners to expand your reach. You can choose webcast time, settings, time, and options for email confirmations easily. Use attendee engagement metrics to measure your webinar performance and their attentiveness based on the focus, participation, and duration. Assess buyer behavior by asking product-specific polls and answering hot topics with up-voting. Have extra control over your webinars by moderating and managing attendee and presenter communications. Integrate BlueJeans with Salesforce, Facebook Live, Marketo, Splash, and more.
Conclusion
These were the top webinar software that can help you grow your business. So, please choose one of them based on your budget and compare it against the features provided while accounting for your audience size.
