From the early days of the screen sharing technology around the year 2000, marketers recognized the value and advantages of remote presentations. The improvement in the speed and reliability of the Internet in those years, combined with advances in VOIP (Voice Over IP) led to a number of Webex-like platforms that enabled online meetings and by extension the ability to present to tens or hundreds of attendees online.
This “natural” progression from online meetings to online presentations is the origin of the problem with all webinar platforms even to this day. By viewing webinars as a larger version of a meeting, they simply patched-up online meeting tools and created over-simplified “webinar platforms”. A perfect example of this practice is when Citrix acquired GoToMeeting, then added a couple of features such as polling and event registration, and marketed it as GoToWebinar! The “Webinar” practice was never given enough thought and never had its own platform designed and built for the sole purpose of creating online presentations. Below are the main reasons why you need a newer and better webinar platform for your marketing presentations.
- Unlike Online Meetings, Webinars Can and Should Be Prepared
While the nature of online meetings makes their content inherently spontaneous, marketing webinars do not have to follow suit. On the contrary, marketing presentations should be interactive yet, like TV Shows, created with a clear sequence of events in mind. For instance, a presentation could begin with a short video clip as introduction, followed by a deck of slides, then by an engaging poll, followed by more slides or a live demo, finally ending with a Q&A session. A survey of our Webinato customers led to the conclusion that although the majority of webinar organizers see value in using more rich-media and interactive tools during webinars, they purposely decide not to do so in order to keep the execution of their webinars simple and free of surprises.Based on the above, the ideal webinar platform should not only allow you to schedule a sequence of content but also assist you in running the show through automation and intelligent features. Imagine being able to create a storyboard of content ahead of time and then be able to run it at event time like a TV show Director.
- There Is Need For Updated Technologies
A number of new technologies are transforming the web and browser-based experience by allowing for lighter and faster client interfaces. Most webinar solutions today are still leveraging the Adobe Flash Player structure that is outdated and barely supported by modern browsers.New techs such as HTML5, WebRTC or React/Redux interfaces on the browser side and others like node.js, modern WebRTC-based media streaming servers and websockets on the server-side enable the creation of much more reliable Audio / Video communication systems without the need to install any additional software on your desktop computers or even downloading any mobile applications.
- New Modern UI Is Needed To Enhance The User Experience
Webinar platforms are the interface through which you introduce your company and brand live to your prospects and customers. As such, the user interface and the general user experience they have reflect significantly on your image. It is time you upgrade from most webinar interfaces that are designed “functionally” by engineers with crowded screens. The iPhone generation is expecting a lot more from an interface they’re going to spend an hour of their time on.New patterns such as Material Design can create a much cleaner and more consistent experience for your attendees and presenters alike during event registration, the real-time presentation and post-event activities.When building the Flow platform, our team tried to took into account the all the points mentioned above and went back to the drawing board, constantly validating our designs with customers’ feedback. We tried to build a new fresh platform from the ground up dedicated to sophisticated marketing webinars that lead to higher conversion rates.