Planning to generate leads for your B2B business using webinars but unsure which platforms provide the features you need to deliver the webinar and follow up on your leads? We have outlined below the key criteria you should be thinking of when assessing a webinar platform for B2B performance marketing and reviewed our favorite tools.
Where to start?
Selecting the right platform to run your webinars on is one of the critical decisions you will make for your B2B lead gen strategy. Firstly, you need to consider what are the most important criteria that your webinar tool should fulfill:
- To maximize the number of users attending your webinar, the platform should have a simple and clear way for your prospects to sign up. The tool should provide an easy to use landing page experience following B2B landing page best practices or a solid lead ad integration for traffic building.
- It also needs automated reminder flows before the start which also includes an email integration that can send a meeting invitation directly to the calendar of participants.
- The platform should have easy recording and tracking capabilities so that you can easily see which participants joined, who saw a replay for the webinar and, ideally, who stayed for the entire event and who dropped out early. This will allow you to prioritize the most engaged webinar sign up leads for future outreach and nurturing.
- Ideally, it should have an option to continuously run the webinar that was recorded with a “live feeling”. This allows you to use the content you have created here to generate leads in the future.
- Finally, from a user perspective, it needs to be easy to use without any need for software installation on desktop and mobile. Otherwise a lot of users can’t participate because their IT departments have locked down their devices
What are the options?
Some of the webinar platforms have been around for quite some time. Some are pretty new. We’ve already tested several webinar options with our clients and there were three that we think stood out. Here they are:
This French webinar platform is known for its user friendly interface. It provides modules for every possible webinar style, e.g. product demos, live events, customer training, online courses, you name it and you most likely get it with this tool.
Livestorm has a Basic and a Premium version. The Basic version is free and it allows up to 10 viewers and 20 minutes of recording. This is useful for testing the software or if you plan to showcase a smaller feature of your product to small group of users. The Premium version is based on the number of live attendees. It begins at $99 per month for 100 attendees and goes up to $209 per month for 1,000 attendees.
Because of the extensive automation features here, we can say that this platform is best for the companies that look for tool which basically do everything for them. If you’re looking for a platform which needs to be more customized or for one which would allow more than 1000 participants, then Livestorm is probably not the choice for you.
Let’s start with the fact that Demio doesn’t offer a free version, but there is a 14 day free trial version available. Pricing ranges from $34 to $163. What you can get for it? Every plan has standard features such as: unlimited webinars, unlimited registrants, storage for 100 recordings, 24/7 chat and email support, advanced webinar set up, engagement tools, detailed analytics and more. The most expensive version allows you to have 500 attendees which is less than Livestorm most expensive version.
Demio enables you to conduct online events, hold interactive training sessions, easy team collaboration for webinars and so on. Comparing to Livestorm, there is less language possibilities available in Demio. Also, training for using the tool is conducted only via Webinar or documentation.
Mobile dominates the world today, so the advantage of using Demio is also the fact that it offers a mobile version, for both: iOS and Android.
In general, Demio is an easy to set up tool. The design is simple and everything you would need for smaller webinars is integrated. It also comes with “Automated events”, which are recorded webinars which give the feeling of a live event to the users
This is a combination of two products that come mainly from the affiliate space, where they more or less the inventors of “live recorded” webinars. To be honest, the websites and interface can look a little scammy (they can’t really hide their affiliate background, I guess…), but don’t get discouraged because the tool itself is moderately easy to use and very robust.
Webinarjam enables you to conduct not only interactive and engaging webinars but also other live stream events. Compared to the tools mentioned above, Webinarjam also has a special feature called Attendee Spotlight, which permits you to invite any webinar attendees to share his or her experiences and ideas with the rest of the audience. Another interesting feature is the Whiteboard Idea, which basically allows you to quickly highlight, draw or write annotations directly on the screen.
Other than that, Webinarjam has other standard features such as: active chat, polls and surveys, active offers, scheduling, automated E-mails/SMS and so on.
Regarding pricing, there are three available plans.
- Basic plan starts with $ 499 billed annually. This plan allows for 500 attendees, 2 presenters and 2 hours max. Duration.
- The Professional plan costs $ 699 annually and you can have up to 2000 attendees, 4 presenters and 3 hours max. duration.
- The Enterprise plan costs $ 999. It includes 5000 participants, 6 presenters and max duration is 4 hours.
All plans have 24/7 support and unlimited webinars.
Webinarjam can handle a large volume of webinars so it’s suitable also for companies that plan a significant rollout of their webinar strategy for lead generation
All of the mentioned webinar platforms are user friendly. It just depends on how much you want to invest, what are your needs and expectations in terms of the amount of attendees, automated marketing tool, engaging options and operation possibilities.
