Hosting a webinar probably sounds both exciting and a little scary. You know webinar video conferences are useful for brand-building, but they can also be used for just about everything, from direct sales to teaching a class. Whether you’re a novice webinar organizer, or consider yourself an expert, the truth is that there are webinar best practices that include tools you can leverage during your event. What are those webinar tools? How can they help you pull off a flawless event, no matter what your goals are?
Best Webinar Tools to Make Your Event Successful
Having a webinar doesn’t mean you’ll convert attendees into buyers. However, it helps if you take on some webinar best practices to ensure a better participant experience. You’ll need a reliable service that’s able to scale up if you get more attendees than you initially plan for. The video and audio feed should be very high quality. We recommend that the webinar provider uses cloud technology so that participants won’t have to fool around with downloading some kind of plugin to make the webinar software work.
With all of these details in hand, you’re ready to take the next step: making sure your video conferencing provider can offer the best webinar tools to make the experience pop. What are those webinar video features that you need to make your event highly interactive and entertaining?
Interactive Webinar Features to Engage Your Audience
The entire point of a webinar is engagement. During an online webinar video, you never truly know if the person is paying attention unless they’re speaking or participating in some way. Some of the webinar tools you need to reach out and entice the audience with a little interaction include:
1. Real-time chat features. Make sure you test out how you’ll use chat to keep your audience participating throughout the event. Will you use it for breakout rooms or live Q&A? Having a moderator to monitor those breakout chats is an important webinar feature that many people overlook. You should integrate these chat sessions throughout the event.
2. Polling features. Don’t overlook audience polling as a webinar tool you can use effectively throughout the event to increase audience engagement. Polling is a webinar tool that can not only engage the audience, but also give you valuable feedback about who your audience really is. Look for a webinar video provider that offers this feature and don’t settle for anything less.
3. Waiting rooms. An important security-related webinar best practice is to invite attendees into a waiting room before the event starts. That way you can check the attendee list against your registrants to ensure that you haven’t been hijacked by a bad actor. The webinar tool should also allow you to make use of the waiting room space by turning it into an advertisement for your company or product. For example, you should be able to brand the waiting room with your corporate colors and populate it with a video scroll that gives audiences things to look at while they’re being let into the event. It’s another way to engage participants on the front-end, and it should be considered a standard webinar best practice for your event planning process.
These features are on the public facing side of your online video event. But there are also backend webinar tools that are critically important to your event. What are they?
Backend Webinar Tools to Look for
4. Mobile accessibility. In 2021, mobile penetration was greater than 66%. This illustrates that your webinar video conferencing vendor should have a fully accessible tool that views well on any size screen. Investing in a mobile accessible webinar tool is a best practice for your company and your events.
5. Webinar video security. We live in an era of Zoombombing, and it isn’t just that big-name vendor that is vulnerable. Without solid webinar security best practices, your company (and the video conferencing vendor you select) is vulnerable to meeting crashers. Look for a webinar platform that offers features like encryption and end-to-end security features.
Webinar video security is also your responsibility. Never publish a live video link on social media (unless you intend to allow anyone into a "public" meeting room that you have created). Set-up waiting rooms to screen participants. Have a security moderator who can shut down individual participants and their interactive features if needed.
6. Technical support. Technical support should be a standard part of the webinar tools your vendor offers. But it shouldn’t be just on the backend as you plan and launch the event. Your attendees should have a chat or call-in feature that allows them access to a troubleshooter on the tech support side.
7. Cloud webinar tool. We should also mention a webinar best practice on the backend that has to do with how you access the event. Consider an online, browser-based webinar vendor as your top choice for your event. This means your participants simply click on the link to the webinar—they do not have to download any software to their device.
There are several benefits to this. First, there are no risky internet downloads for you or the attendee. This makes for a higher level of security. Second, it’s more convenient to attend the conference with a one-click process. Finally, it will cut down on customer service issues where the attendee struggles to get the software downloaded in time to join the webinar video event.
8. Analytics. Making data-driven decisions should be a key strategic goal for your company in 2022. So, look for a webinar tool that allows you to slice and dice attendee data, including their participation in the interactive features during the conference. The analytics that your webinar video platform vendor uses should also give you an idea for how long the attendee stuck around, and link to post-conference feedback mechanisms that determine what the customer thought about the event.
The more data you have, the better chance that you can ensure webinar best practices to apply to your next event.
Having the right webinar vendor is the baseline first step toward pulling off a successful event. MegaMeeting offers all eight of these webinar best practices—and more. You have an alternative to commercial video conferencing solutions. Find out why we’re different and how we can help your business.
MegaMeeting solves the biggest challenges of modern video conferencing. For users, it is an all-in-one platform that delivers both video conferencing and webinars in a single, simplified interface. For attendees, it is 100% browser-based, making it highly accessible; joining a meeting is instantaneous from a single click. For enterprises, it is highly customizable, with white-labeling options for a private branded solution. For developers, it is API-driven and easy to integrate.
Powered by WebRTC, Node.js, React, and GraphQL, it is a cutting-edge platform that is fun and easy to use for users and developers alike.
