What is a webinar?

A webinar is an engaging online event using webinar software, where a speaker or a small group of speakers deliver a presentation to a large audience. These sessions can be used to share knowledge, ideas and updates with your audience.

Benefits of webinars:

  • Webinars are an ideal tool for generating sales leads.
  • Webinars build on your brand value, directly to your target audience.
  • Webinars can be extremely cost effective.

How are webinars cost effective?

Webinars are extremely cost effective; the cost of hosting a meeting can be significant. Booking hotels and meeting rooms along with associated food and refreshments can add up. Added to that you potentially have travel costs to be considered as well as the time that is taken up planning and working with the venue. There is also the added risk that even if people don’t turn you will have already budgeted and paid for them.

When you run a webinar there are none of these costs or risks. There can also be significant economies of scale. When this is calculated as the cost per attendee, the real benefits can be seen – doubling your attendees doesn’t double your costs- it actually halves them.

How much more popular have webinars become in 2020?

Since the Coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, virtual events are up 1,000%, according to a recent article in Forbes which also estimates that the number of organisations planning a virtual event has doubled.

The large increase can be seen in the Zoom share price which started 2020 at less than $69 per share, and recently closed at just over $239 per share; a 248% jump from the beginning of the year.

Tomorrowland around the world:

Tomorrowland is a Belgian electronic dance music festival held in Boom, Belgium. And, like almost all events on the planet, 2020’s edition was forced to be cancelled. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the gathering of such large crowds impossible. Tomorrowland’s team came up with the idea to have a virtual festival that resulted in more than 60 artists filming brand new sets on 6x8x8-metre green screens, in four different locations – São Paulo, Sydney, Los Angeles and Boom itself. Usually, Tomorrowland has around 400,000 attendees, but online, over 1 million people attended the concert from all around the world.

Here in Ireland, the Hugh lane gallery is currently hosting their exhibitions online so people can still view the art safely from home. The Marie Keating Foundation recently ran its Concert for Cancer (https://www.mariekeating.ie/concert4cancer/) on TV3 and online and in the process managed to raise almost half a million Euro.

Companies like Combined Media can provide a fully managed webinar service but it is something you can try yourself. Most of the webinar platforms offer a trial period or event so why not try them out. GoToWebinar offers a free 7-day trial (https://www.gotomeeting.com/en-ie/webinar/try) and Zoom offers a free plan for up to 100 attendees – https://zoom.us/pricing.

Combined Media provide fully managed webinar services. For more details contact Combined Media