5+1 useful presentation tools for webinars

Marketing and sales, employee training, educational purposes: conversing via screen is elementary these days. If you are about to host an online webinar, here are six tools – ranked in no particular order – that you might find useful.

Before you make your pick, it helps to sum up your purpose. Are you going to give a lecture for students? Internal training courses for employees? Do you want to record your webinar for later demand? Or do you even want participants to pay for accessing your presentation? Answering these questions beforehand will make it easier for you to choose the right tool and not spend money on features you won’t need.

As a general rule, tools get more expensive with an increasing number of participants. So if you intend to host webinars for 100 people and more, you are looking at different scales than if you are working in a niche expecting between 10 and 50 participants.

Google Hangouts + WebinarsOnAir

If you have a Google+ account, Hangouts might not be new to you – but the combination with a second tool called WebinarsOnAir is pretty rad. The latter allows you to charge participants for a webinar held through Google Hangouts. While giving you the additional monetary option your attendees don’t have to hassle with a software product they’re unfamiliar with.

Hangouts is also a great channel for bringing several people together. This makes sense if your webinar is not going to be 90% frontal information sharing, but ideally interactive.

GoToWebinar

The basic GoToWebinar software is already a good product if you’re not expecting more than 100 participants to your webinar. Options such as corporate branding, recording and analysis are already included in the basic version.

ReadyTalk

ReadyTalk is a meeting and webinar tool and a great option for large companies and webinars. The basic version already lets you invite up to 100 attendees, the maximum are 3000 attendees. ReadyTalk also offers 24/7 customer support.

ClickMeeting

The ClickMeeting webinar option has an intuitive and very user-friendly interface. Aside from its area of application ranging from education to marketing, it offers handy options for performance evaluation afterwards. There is also a very fair-priced basic version for small to medium-sized companies and webinars.

Cisco WebEx

Events, webinars, customer support: WebEx is a global market leader and one of the “classic” tools. By using specific cloud space for hosting the app advertises its speed and reliability which are crucial for real-time communication.

Plus 1: feedbackr

Why, of course we’d love you to include feedbackr in your webinar 🙂 Just give out the access code via chat window to your webinar attendees and they’re immediately good to give feedback. Implement real-time answers in your presentation and work from there. And if you’re a little flustered about everything going alright: we are happy to support you in real-time throughout the webinar.