- Webinars are a really powerful tool to really connect
and engage with your audience online.
In this video we catch up with Steve Dotto
from dottotech.com and he talks us through
the best webinar software to help you decide
which one is right for you.
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- Hey it's Justin Brown, here from Primal Video.
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Let's jump into it.
- Steve, thank you very much for joining us.
For those of you who don't know who he is then make sure
you check out his channel, this guy is awesome.
Not just video,
but webinars and really everything tech and online.
So can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
- Well I, for many years I was in traditional media
doing a syndicated TV show, radio show, newspaper in Canada.
And about 2010 I migrated over into the online space
and took my experiences from traditional media
into the online world, and that's kinda the lens
that I look at our news space through.
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And that is such a good question, you know.
The problem with the webinar tools is they aren't the tools
that you can test out, you can't really sit there
and try this webinar platform, or try that webinar platform
with your audience 'cause once you're into the webinar
you're kinda fully committed, aren't you?
You're into it.
So for me, as you're evaluating
the different webinar platforms if you take a step back
from what the webinar platform's marketing does,
and look at how the webinar software's designed,
kind of understand what it's designed for,
it's gonna give you an idea if it's gonna work for you.
All people aren't gonna have the same goal.
Some people want sales, some people want it for training,
some people want it for internal communications,
there's lots of different reasons
we may want to do webinars.
So when you look at the platforms,
let's just talk about a couple of the real, the top ones.
Let's talk about GoToWebinar, let's talk about WebinarJam,
let's talk about Zoom.
Let's talk about those three, okay?
So GoToWebinar's old school webinar, that is,
as far as I'm concerned, is not caught up with the time.
Because when we look at it what it does is it's robust,
it's reliable, but it's boring.
It doesn't have a great video out option,
as far as capturing the video, but especially
it doesn't have great conversation management.
It tends to hide the chat, the conversation
that your community is having
and it tries to isolate the host from that chat.
So I think it's really limited as far as that.
It's really a corporate, almost a corporate training tool
where you're not concerned about how comfortable
your audience is, you're more concerned
about the fact they have to sit there and listen through it.
Now let's talk about Zoom for a moment.
Zoom was designed as conferencing software
from the beginning.
It's designed to encourage interaction
and encourage conversation.
It's not necessarily outstanding
for large list building type webinars,
or internet marketing webinars,
but it's phenomenal for training
and conversation and consultation.
From as small a group as two to much large groups,
the fact that you can easily engage and bring
other guests into the conversation,
that is the strength of Zoom.
So for conversations, for dialogue,
Zoom, because it's built on conferencing,
is a really great choice.
- And how many people can you get into a Zoom?
- Oh you can have 500, you can have 1,000.
I mean you can scale up with all of these solutions,
so that's not an issue.
Of course, you're gonna be delivering it
slightly differently when you have a larger scale,
but perhaps in Zoom you might be doing
more of a panel conversation than a one person presentation.
If you think about the conferencing capabilities
from that perspective, right?
Now the one that I end up using myself,
because I'm an online marketer, is WebinarJam.
Now WebinarJam was built by internet marketers
and it's got all sorts of features that are designed
to support the online marketing world.
For example, it's got it's own email auto-responder,
it's got wonderful integration to CMSs, not to CMSs, CRMs.
So Infusionsoft and the like, being able to--
As soon as somebody registers for the webinar,
using WebinarJam software,
to have that create a record for you
in your CRM, that's super powerful.
- So they're tracking then all the way--
- All they're tracking all the way through.
It's very powerful from that perspective.
So that tool is built.
The other thing that it's really,
and Zoom is also very good at,
is making sure that you have an audience,
all of the audience chat is right up in front in there.
Now where that's important is when you're delivering
a webinar you don't have any opportunity
for the same social proof as you do in a seminar.
You can't see somebody nodding,
you can't hear, you hear a gasp,
you can't hear people go yes,
you can't hear people groaning,
you don't get the proof that we all crave--
- The feedback.
- Out of the group, yeah, it's social proof.
Whereas, in a chat you'll see that.
You'll see the presenter make a comment
and then all of a sudden the chat
will explode with support or questions,
and when people are asking questions
it might validate, or your customers.
So from that perspective I like a tool
that creates that sort of engagement,
but that's because I'm in a marketing environment.
I'm doing some training but ultimately
I'm probably gonna be moving into the sales process.
And WebinarJam brings other tools into that,
such as the ability to do calls to action, et cetera.
Now all of these tools, the other thing you wanna look for,
is does it give you flexibility
to do hybrid webinars if you want.
Where you have live presentation
but then you're interspersing pre-recorded content.
That's a really powerful way to control the time
of the webinar because often a presenter
is gonna lose track a little bit as he's, ya know,
and start to wander a little bit off track
and stretch what's supposed to be a 45 minute webinar
to an hour 15, which doesn't do any good for anybody.
So that's a tool, that's something that both Zoom
and WebinarJam, and for that matter GoToWebinar,
they all do fairly well.
But the other huge differentiation, in my mind,
with a tool like WebinarJam, is it's the only tool
that has a producers console.
It's got a second window that opens
when you launch the webinar that gives a producer a look
at the entire environment of all of the webinar assets.
So you can see the chat happening, you can see your videos
and your offers that you're gonna be loading.
You can boot people out of the room,
you can see, you'll get all the analytics
of what's happening in the room,
you have your poll questions and all of that all pre-loaded.
And it's like a radio producer's console,
or a television producer's switcher almost,
sitting in front where you can assign the assets
and insert them into the webinar.
And I find that to be a really, a really good way
of approaching the webinars.
So understanding a little bit of the genesis of the webinar,
one designed for social marketing,
one designed for conferencing,
the other designed for more corporate communications,
it will give you a good idea of what tool
might work best for you.
- Awesome, thank you very much for sharing your tips.
And where can we find out more,
where can everyone subscribe or?
- Dottotech.com
- Awesome. - Thank you.
- So that's everything you need to know
about webinar softwares so you can make the best decision
for which one is right for you.
If you found this video helpful then make sure
you click that big subscribe button
and give this video a thumbs up.
And check out Steve Dotto's channel
which we've linked onscreen now.
I'll see you soon.