What is a Live Webinar?
A live webinar is a meeting or presentation (or seminar) conducted online in real-time. Hence the word web-inar. Some people also call webinars web conferences or web seminars. Live webinars allow participants in different locations to see and hear the presenter and interact by asking questions, answering polls, and voting. Webinars are commonly used in sales, marketing, education, and HR training.
One of the biggest advantages of live webinars is the ability to reach hundreds of people and still maintain the interactivity aspect. To get the idea, we need you to look at running online events from a birds-eye-view:
On one side of the spectrum, you have online meetings – digital get-togethers for teams, business partners, or customers, where up to 25 attendees can turn on their webcams and mics, and quite surely – you can perceive them as interactive at its best!
In the middle, you will find live webinars where the audience grows up to 1k attendees – leads, customers, trainees – everyone highly interested in what you want to share. The beauty lies right here – even though you virtually bring together hundreds of people, it’s far from a one-way communication. On the contrary, live webinars allow you to connect to and interact with your audience, answer their questions, and gather valuable feedback. In fact, webinars are the second-most valuable influencer content format.
On the other side of that spectrum, you can come across webcasts, aka huge virtual events, which will give you an option to get your content watched (but without a real-time interaction) by even 10k viewers!
To understand live webinars, it’s helpful to look at how they compare to other webinar types as well:
Live webinars. A classic and most popular version of webinars. You schedule your online event to happen at a specific time, and then you meet your audience live. Live webinars are an ideal match for onboarding and training purposes as well as with sales events and product demos.
On-demand webinars. With this option, you pre-record your webinar to release it to your contacts, leads, or students so they can watch it anytime and anywhere they want. If your goal is generating leads and running online courses, on-demand webinars will be a way to go!
Automated webinars. Unlike on-demand events, you schedule automated webinars to take place on a specific day and hour. However, just like above, you need to have a recorded material first and then enrich them with tools like Call-To-Action, a video clip, or a survey. This kind of event goes totally on autopilot, which lets you reinvest your saved time. However, there’s also a hybrid model – automated webinars, which you can join as a host to moderate the chat and answer questions in real-time.
Comparatively, live webinars offer more opportunities for lead gen and nurturing. A live webinar format offers more intimate engagement with real humans as opposed to a recorded asset. The main reason for going live with a webinar is to gather hundreds of folks in real-time and get instant feedback on your webinar content.
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