Are You Using The Right Webinar Technology For The Job?

When it comes to choosing technology, marketers are really weird. I have seen companies spend over a year exploring marketing automation platforms or email software, watching demos, reading case studies, meeting with sales reps, and finally making a decision only to then change their minds and start all over again. It’s a process. A long, deliberate process.

Yet with some foundational marketing technologies like webinars, companies often have a less serious approach. We constantly hear from marketers that are using basic meeting tools to deliver their demand generation webinars — not because they like the technologies (in fact, they never even vetted them), but because the IT department was already paying for it, and were told they could use it too. Think about that. Webinars are the single most important tool for generating leads and many marketers are not even evaluating the platform they use. That’s crazy! What does it look like when you use a tool that’s not built for your needs?

This explains a certain look we see on marketers faces when we tell them that there’s a better way. With a perplexed gaze, they ask questions like “My attendees don’t have to download software to view the webinar? Really?” or “What do you mean I can have instant access to registration data? I didn’t think that was possible.” It is when you’re using the right tool for the job. They seem shocked that they didn’t know this but how could they if there was never any marketing technology search? No product evaluations. No feature comparisons. They simply said “OK” when asked if they wanted to leverage existing small meeting tools for much larger webinar programs, too.

There is nothing wrong with meeting tools; we use them all the time… for meetings. But webinars are far too important to not use the right tool for the job. It’s the heart of the ON24 value proposition: our platform is purpose-built to help marketers generate and qualify sales-ready leads. How? With a rich suite of interactive tools, detailed real-time analytics on attendee behavior, and editing tools that turn a single webinar into multiple video assets. It’s the difference between a meeting tool and a webinar marketing platform. So, are you using the right tool for the job?