Choosing the Best Webinar Platform for Your Marketing Agency - #AgencyToolbox

Welcome back to episode number 12 of Agency Toolbox. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie. Just to give you a little sneak peek into how Agency Toolbox works, we categorize, we organize our episodes into seasons, which are campaigns that we manage inside of our project management software, Do Inbound. And every single season is basically a quarter's worth. So episode number 12 is going to be the end of season number one. So that's a little sneak peek into where we're at. Welcome. You made it to the last episode here in season one. I'm excited to come back in season number two with some of the feedback that I've gotten from this first, from the first 12 episodes that we've done and some lessons that I've learned and also hit on some of the topics that you guys have brought up that you want to learn more about. So back in episode number six, we talked about what we use for conference calls for online meetings at Guavabox and at Do Inbound and mentioned Uber conference. Today we're going to be talking about the best webinar platform. So not just one to one or small group calls, but what do you do when you want to host webinars and put on webinars. And webinars are something that we've been doing now for, I don't know, two and a half, three years at Guava Box and also using them at Do Inbound. And so I want to talk about choosing the best webinar platform for, for your situation, if you are a marketing agency. So I'm going to take you inside of the, inside of the website for, you know what, I'm not going to take you inside the back end because that's going to be, I think that might add more confusion than less. Instead, I'm going to show you some of the alternatives that we've looked at and talk through kind of on a more high level why we've chosen the platform that we've chosen. And then if there are requests to see how things break down from there for folks who aren't familiar with those platforms, we can get into that in another episode. Alright, so I just have four pages pulled up here of a couple of the solutions that we've tried. And the first one that we tried was gotowebinar and this was kind of the standard that we'd seen out there. It's from Citrix. It's the same type of experience as GoToMeeting, which we'd been using for a while. And we're going to come back to Gotowebinar in a second. But a couple other alternatives that we looked at. We looked at Webinar Jam, which is becoming more powerful and it's built on top of the Google hangouts technology. So WebinarJam is something that we tried out. We really didn't have a great experience. And I can go into some of the details on why that was. But to break it down for you, real simply schedule putting. Putting together the webinar itself is not that complicated. There's a number of different steps, but it's not too hard to do. They have a ton of marketing resources out there for WebinarJam and if you're using it and loving it, I would love to hear about that. The reason that we wound up wanting to try WebinarJam was we wanted to use pre recorded sections that we had put together inside live webinars that we were doing. So live intro and then have a pre built section of content ready to go so that we weren't relying on three or four different people to be on the webinar at the same time. We do a number of webinars with just one or two of us usually try to have two people there. But we wanted to kind of spice things up a little bit more. And so we chose Webinar Jam because it does have a system for playing YouTube videos or other recorded videos during your webinar. And the problem that we ran into was the YouTube video. You can load it up, you can intro into it, you play it, but you're going to wind up with some dead space at the end of that where it becomes really obvious that you're just playing a recorded piece. And so that was. We decided if it's not going to be a smooth experience for people, then it's just, it's not worth doing it. And it's much better just to say, hey, we're going to do this, we're going to run through this live. It's going to take more people or we're just going to have a recorded video in the first place. That was the choice that we wound up making. It was just a little bit too complex for what we were trying to do. The platform that we tried before that was Webinar Ignition. And this is another webinar platform built on top of the Google Hangouts platform and Google Hangouts on Air and it wraps around that, but it uses WordPress to do so. And so that was a platform that we were comfortable with, tried it out and there just wasn't enough Customization, it wasn't reliable enough. You just run into some issues anytime you're using Google Hangouts with the delay between what you're saying. One of the things that was really important to us was the ability to have live interaction and unmute folks live on the call. And the problem is there was like a 30 to 45 second delay on average between what we were saying and then what people were hearing. So that kind of killed the live interaction aspect. Another tool, this is one that, just to be honest, I have not used this yet, but have looked at Zoom quite a bit and definitely want to try it out here at some point. But they do video conferencing, web conferencing, and also have been working on webinar solutions. So if you're using Zoom right now or another platform, there's 10, probably 10 more platforms off the top of my head that I could name and that you've probably heard of that also are pretty popular webinar solutions out there. Some of them are significantly more expensive than these ones that we're looking at here. Some of them are less expensive or free. But these are some of the things that we've used and there have been kind of some similar struggles with most of the platforms that we've used. So all that to say, what have we finally settled on? Well, we've settled on GoToWebinar. That's what we're using right now. And we've been using this for quite a while. But some of the features that stick out that we like the most, number one is just the ability for live interaction. So the interface, I wouldn't describe it as kind of the sleek 2015 look. It looks a little dated, but it really is probably it's the most reliable platform that we found for being able to unmute people, talk to them in real time, have live chat back and forth, you know, use questions, use polls, a lot of the stuff that you're used to seeing. And most people are familiar with the GoToWebinar platform, so that has been a plus as well. Now, one of the major downsides, aside from the hassle of getting into it, is just that it is, it's probably not the most bandwidth friendly. So we've run into some issues before with bandwidth, but they have updated a number of things in their technology and that seemed to improve. And then another hesitation that I hear a lot is, well, it's really pricey to have and you know, you do pay a little bit for it. For us, it's definitely worth it to have it. But as far as pricing on their end, let's see if they have it here. They do. Okay, so up to 100 attendees, you pay $79 per organizer per month. And all the way up to, you know, if you had a thousand attendees, then you're going to wind up paying $400 a month. I will say this about the pricing. They are more than willing to do discounts. And if you get on a call on a demo with somebody, the odds that you actually wind up paying these prices are not that high. I think right now we pay maybe $60 a month per organizer or $50 to $60 a month per organizer. So it's still going to be pricey. But and that's on a plan that's up to 100 attendees per webinar. So it does really have it's got a lot of, a lot of nice things built into it, especially with the ability to do recordings, to do polls and surveys. And you're able to see how many people are paying attention who's not active inside the window that you've got pulled up right now. So there's a good amount of stuff that comes with it. And you also additionally, you'll get a free seat of GoToMeeting. So you can have as many GoToMeeting conferences or GoToWebinar webinars set up through that platform as possible. You just can't do both at the same time. So you can't run a GoToMeeting in a webinar at the same time. That's the tool that we've used. I've had people ask a little bit about how we actually run our webinars and what makes an effective webinar. There's a lot of training. I don't think that we're experts. We've been doing it for a couple years now and have learned a lot of good lessons. That's something where we bake some of our webinar processes into the Do Inbound platform. So if you're interested in learning more, you can shoot me an email grayoinbound.com and that may be something to this point, I've just kind of answered those on a one by one basis, but maybe something that we roll into a future episode. Also, if you have tips on running effective webinars, head over to doinbound.com toolbox. I'd love to see that in the comments there for everyone to learn from. Or if you send it to me directly via email, I'll do my best to share that as well. All right. Well, that's going to do it for episode number 12 of Agency Toolbox. I appreciate you sticking it out for season number one. I'd love your feedback on how to improve the podcast as a whole, and look forward to seeing you back in episode number 13, the beginning of season two of Agency Toolbox.