You wouldn’t stir your coffee with a shovel or dig a hole with a spoon, would you? Similarly, marketers have many tools to use, and often through trial and error they discover which tool is best for a specific job. Yet I continue to hear about marketers attempting to use online meeting tools to run webinars, only to obtain lackluster results.
So what’s the reason behind these lackluster results, you ask? It’s simple, really: an online meeting tool doesn’t meet the same needs satisfied by a webinar platform. You may need both, but they are ideally suited for very different applications.
When to use an online meeting tool
An online meeting tool works great for small, collaborative groups. You may want to use an online meeting tool further down the buying cycle when it’s time to engage 1-on-1 with a prospective customer, for example.
When to use a webinar platform
Webinars are very effective at driving your prospects through every stage of the buying cycle. Use a webinar platform when you need to generate sales-ready leads through high-engagement webinars. Use the detailed analytics to identify the most effective leads, setting your sales team up for success.
- Effectively reach large, targeted audiences
A webinar platform will empower you to reach large, targeted audiences. Using tools such as enhanced Q&A, group chat, Twitter, resource downloads, polls, and surveys, you can effectively engage with your audience during a webcast. - Advanced analytics
A webinar platform will provide you with so much more than just basic information about attendees. The key benefit is that a webinar platform increases the engagement of users so that you can focus on the hottest leads. Using the engagement actions of a webinar such as questions, polls, surveys, resources, viewing time, and widget activity, a webinar platform can measure the engagement of individual viewers. This is huge for marketers!
A meeting is NOT a webinar
Meeting and conferencing tools are built for…meetings and conferences. Webinars created on meeting tools are less reliable and less accessible and offer very little in the way of audience analytics. So don’t “dig” a webinar with a spoon—use a shovel, a purpose-built webinar marketing platform.