Gone are the days when seminars were a promotional activity. No one ever thinks about booking a physical space for getting in touch with a huge audience, who qualifies as the target audience. Seminars were just the starting of such promotions for B2B as well as B2C businesses. They were time-bound, and geography bound.
Nowadays, everything has become a matter of access to the internet. That is all that you need to reach out to millions of people across the globe and present your pitch, product, or promotional message. From seminars and events, companies have made the switch to webinars. Now, sitting inside the office, with a simple internet connection, one can plan and execute their entire webinar strategy in no time. If you too are thinking how can you use webinars to your advantage, here are a few points:
Webinars are one the most convenient marketing activities that can be applied to any stage of a product or service - educating, convincing, converting, and retaining. As we've mentioned before all you need is an internet connection and you can host a webinar in no time. So, hosting an on-demand webinar is never a problem.
Webinars mean instant promotions: Along with a mix of other activities such as using website banners, social media ads, newsletter, and email marketing, you can use webinars to extend the impact of your product's promotion. They are great to increase the exposure of that your business or product is looking for. They are one of the best medium to talk about your product, its features and benefits. You can also give live demo of how your product works on a webinar. People love webinars because they are so much better than reading about a product and its advertisements on websites and other mediums. They simply understand better when it is all demonstrated to them in a live video format.
Webinars imbibe credibility: Getting face to face with your audience is one of the best ways of instilling some trust in the later. People think that your idea or product is more credible when they hear it from you and watch you talking about it. If they simultaneously get to ask questions, that is even better as it further brings in more credibility to your ideas. In a webinar, everyone has a voice and is free to ask questions or discuss. When people come together in such an event and there is so much transparency around your product or idea, trust issues are highly unlikely to spur.
Webinars can be used to train new users about your product or old users about a new feature in your product. Using live streams as well as webcasts, you can stream how-to videos or tutorials that can equip your users with complete understanding about product usage. Manuals are cumbersome and people often end up calling customer service to understand how a product works. If their queries aren't handled well, then people end up disappointed and search for other simpler alternatives. With webinars you can SHOW them how to use the product and how simple actually it is!
The reach is impressive. You build numerous new contacts, and it is all so cost-effective. Webinars allows you to create a huge audience in the form of viewers or even other people on your panel. You can use this contact list that you have built from webinars for lead nurturing, and also as the base list for all your future webinars. The best thing is that webinars aren't heavy on the pocket at all. Some webinar solutions are also available for free; however, those have limited functionality. Why shouldn't one then be having a webinar hosting solution in their marketing arsenal?
However, picking a hosting solution is a major decision. Budgeting, priorities, and scope of work need to be carefully analyzed when looking for a webinar solution. Also, while webinars are a great method of building contacts, gathering leads, and promoting products, each and every stage of the webinar has to be planned. It would be just too much work if all this had to be done manually. That is why we have webinar tools to our rescue.
A good webinar hosting service provider should be able to successfully help you do all this with ease, other than being able to present the webinar to the audience without any friction. Any noise when a live webinar is being telecast, due to reasons like poor connectivity, technical issues etc. can destroy the entire experience. And, experience is all that customers are looking for nowadays.
They don't want any speed, space, or time boundations. Too slow to load, they quit. Disturbance in video, they quit. Cannot connect, the quit. All these are just the basics. There are a number of other expectations that both businesses and customers have from their webinar hosting solution. Businesses, for example, must be able to do their list and contact building like it is cakewalk, with a webinar solution. With all these things in mind, let's discuss Jetwebinar and why it is one of the best 'Instant webinar hosting solution for marketers'.
Jetwebinar - Your go-to solution for webinar hosting
If you are a marketer who has been looking for alternatives better than Gotowebinar, Anymeeting, Clickmeeting etc., then Jetwebinar is something you must consider. In this post, we will be reviewing this webinar hosting solution in detail, so that if you are considering either buying for the first time or switching from your old solution, you are well equipped with all the information that you need.
To begin with, let's understand that JetWebinar is not just a webinar hosting solution. It is infact, one of the best webinar marketing automation software. So, not just it only helps you host your webinar but also manage it completely, with the power of automation. That is why, marketers love using Jetwebinar. The ease and efficiency that it offers is a welcome thing for anyone who has too much on his plate to handle. Just to give you an overview of a sort, with Jetwebinar one can:
- Easily and conveniently host live webinars, as well as convert them automatically in to recurring simulated live webinars
- Be assured of absolutely zero video lag, even when the number of attendees is very high
- Create on-demand webinars that give the same experience of a live webinar
- Rely on the quality of video, sound, and an uninterrupted experience
Over and above the promise of quality, the product features that Jetwebinar comes with have been discussed in detail in this post.
Jetwebinar features
FASTEST real time live webinars: The video lag time that Jetwebinar promises is less than 1 second. This is quite a good speed for the high level of video quality that Jetwebinar delivers, for a huge attendee list. With Jetwebinar, webinar videos can be streamed onto both web cams and/or screens. Adding to the whole experience of Live webinars is that the audience can chat live with the presenter using the 'real-time chat room'. So, as the host, you can address doubts and questions in real-time.
Automation of webinars: You can re host your webinar whenever you want to, in whichever part of the world. You don't need to go live everytime. Just autoschedule them with Jetwebinar. Pick your days and times for hosting a recurring webinar, and you can automate the rest at a click. Jetwebinar can automatically coordinate the events as well as send all the related communication about the webinar to make things simple and organized. On the other hand, audience really doesn't need to be on the toes for attending a webinar, as they can always opt for a recording or sign-up for a recurrent webinar as per a date that suits their plan.
Custom templates: Presentation is on top of the list for every marketer. If it is boring and impersonal, it is not going to make an impression. This holds for webinars as well. With Jetwebinar, you get custom templates to choose from and make your webinar slides look classy, adhere to brand image, and make an impact. All you need to do is pick a template of choice that matches your brand, and start creating a beautiful webinar experience. These templates can be customized as per your requirement, without any coding knowledge. Perfect!
Personalized email: Let your audience know about an upcoming webinar, send scheduled reminders about the same, and keep following-up on the experience post webinar with email automation and personalization. You can also send notifications to those who dropped out on you or couldn't attend for some reason. Manage your first to last communication with your audience, till the point they sign-up, using Jetwebinar. You don't have to separately send emails using a separate email marketing tool. This is a smart built-in capability that you can handle from within Jetwebinar.
Affiliate tracking: Driving new registrations through affiliate marketing is a breeze with Jetwebinar. You can use a full affiliate dashboard using which you can create individual promoter accounts and track all registrations that come from the individual promoter. That is how you get to create strong partnerships with your biggest promoters, and also keep a track of how successfully they are creating value for your webinars. You can also create custom webinar tracking URL's for affiliates. With Jetwebinar you can add to three custom fields to track information that helps you identify affiliate contributions.
Selling tools: This feature enables you to close more sales in no time. You can, for example, direct your attendees to special sales pages, or ebooks and other content download pages, as soon as your webinar is over. Adding or editing content to your post webinar offer does not take more than a minute and can be done as and when you are hosting the webinar.
Jetwebinar Pricing
There are three plans to pick from, if you've made up your mind about trying out Jetwebinar - Silver, Gold, and Platinum. All of these plans are available for a free trial. The billing for all these plans is on a monthly as well as yearly basis, and there is a 20% discount on all of them.
- The Silver Plan is priced $63 per month
- The Gold Plan is priced $157 per month
- The Platinum plan is priced $379 per month
The pricing varies based on the number of attendees that you can invite. You get all the features of Jetwebinar in all the three plans, as well as email support. Simple and smart pricing!
Jetwebinar Support
The best thing about Jetwebinar is the kind of help and support that is available to its customers. There is a dedicated section for support, which features all options that you can use for contacting them and communicating your doubts over. There is a FAQ section, video tutorials, knowledge base, and how-to videos. They also have a 'chat with us' pop-up on their website where you can just drop your query and get the response. I love it that everything that I need to know is available right in the support section.
Overall, this webinar hosting solution provider is one of the best alternatives. Just in case you aren't still convinced, let's take up a comparison. In this post, we compare two of the leading webinar hosting solution providers. One we've already covered in detail. The other is Demio, which we'll detail upon now.
Demio - General Overview
Setting up a webinar is absolutely a no-brainer when it comes to Demio. It is one of the best webinar hosting solution available, and even beats gotowebinar. One great feature in Demio is that you can 'hide' those tools that you are currently not using. Great for productivity, and efficiency! Demio is also very easy to integrate with other CRMs and automation tools. However, as compared to Jetwebinar where does Demio stand?
Jetwebinar vs Demio
Demio isn't for everyone. Only if your target customer size is 1000+ can you think about using Demio as a webinar hosting solution provider. On the other hand, Jetwebinar is for businesses of all sizes. Your target customer size could be 2 or 2000, Jetwebinar can be used to host your webinars with ease.
Whether you are small, medium, or an enterprise level company, Jetwebinar can be your go-to webinar option. However, Demio is mostly for SaaS companies who want to scale very rapidly.
Both the options are priced at the same level. They both offer free trials. None of them offers free versions.
All these points give Jetwebinar an upper hand over Demio. Apart from this, Jetwebinar wins because the option to personalize emails makes it a complete marketing solution. However, for sending out emails using Demio you will have to integrate it with solutions such as mailchimp, which means extra work!
Just like with Jetwebinars, in Demio also you can schedule and automate webinars. Campaign analysis, and performance tracking make it easy to see how your efforts have paid off. However, affiliate tracking is a feature that makes Jetwebinar again much stronger a competitor in front of Demio.
Demio's basic plan gets you only 50 live attendees while that of Jetwebinar gets you 100. That's almost double. Maximum on demand attendees that Jetwebinar allows is unlimited.
All this said, there are a few things that make Demio one of the best alternatives to tools like WebEx. For example, its power to comprehend data is unmatched. The tool gives you very specific data about your own customers, which is your webinar audience. The analytics feature in Demio does this with such charm and ease, that it completely wins you over. Details and data about your audience are available at a granular level making it extremely easy for you to assess your audience and make customizations as per their behaviour. You can tell how your audience is reacting to your webinar, for example, who were the attendees, who dropped off midway, who registered but failed to attend all together, and who sat through the entire session etc.
Another interesting feature that makes me a Demio fan, along with a loyal Jetwebinar user, is the user friendliness that the former offers. Demio is superior when it comes to ease of use and integration, mark my work for that. Although a lot of tools offer a host of integrations, the whole process is very time consuming and cumbersome. This is not the case with Demio. This is why most marketers in SaaS companies love Demio and try their best to switch to this newly emerging webinar hosting platform. Moreover, Demio has full API with Zapier, which is something that makes it very easy to integrate Demio with a very wide range of smart applications.
Last word in favor of Demio - it enables interaction and engagement, and makes webinars fun. Using the public chat feature, you can open up one on one chats with webinar attendees, well as brainstorm ideas over the public chat. The whole experience becomes more meaningful and enjoyable when there is two way communication happening, instead of one. Jetwebinar, as we've discussed before, also makes this possible.
Wrapping it up
There are a number of webinar hosting service providers, with gotowebinar being one of the most popular ones. However, there are a number of other options that are available to marketers nowadays. As the idea is not just to 'host' a webinar but to focus on the whole experience, as well as ease of a marketers job, the webinar solutions that do it all and do it all the best will rise to the top. Some of the alternatives that have just emerged and are quickly gaining ground are names like Jetwebinar and Demio.
Though both these alternatives are leading webinar hosting service providers, there are a few things that make Jetwebinar win against Demio. However, it is ultimately for the user to decide what suits his requirements the best. That is why we'd ask you to go and sign-up for a free trial for both.
Have you already tried demio or Jetwebinar? Which webinar solution are you using and why? If you want to discuss more around webinar hosting, drop in a comment. We'll get in touch.
