The past few years have seen exponential growth in the number of employees working remotely. At the same time, more professionals are conducting research and seeking information from different online channels.
This has made it essential for every person, especially marketers to understand how to effectively conduct webinars. Getting a webinar idea, a speaker, and setting a date is not the only thing you need to do when conducting webinars.
You need to also plan everything to do with your invites, location, marketing, and many other processes to make your webinar successful.
In this article, we will discuss some of the best tools to use when running a webinar from your Windows computer.
Social Media Management Tool
Businesses can get new leads from social media platforms. They (social media platforms) play a vital role when planning and running webinars. You will need to promote your webinar on platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, among others.
However, you might end up spending a lot of time promoting your webinar on each of these platforms individually. This is because you will need to update regularly and respond to any questions from your target audience.
To make this process easier, you can use a social media management tool such as Hootsuite. You can even schedule posts and share them on different platforms at the same time. All this happens on the same screen.
Collaboration Tool
This is a must-have tool for those running webinars from their Windows computers. A webinar involves many people and different moving parts. This requires you to employ the use of a collaboration tool to ensure that your attendees get the same information at the same time.
You will not need to send multiple updated documents every time something changes, especially when planning for your webinar. There are different collaboration tools you can install on your Windows computer, with Slack being one of the best.
Using these tools, you can chat with colleagues and attendees, create projects, share documents, and integrate different tools and applications.
Email Marketing Tool
When planning for a webinar, chances are that you are going to send your invitations through email. This might be your first contact point between you and your audience, and you need to make sure that nothing goes wrong at this stage.
If you look at this 6-step checklist at ActualTech for conducting webinars, you will realize that one of the most important tips for running a successful webinar is communication. The right communication channels will dictate how successful your webinar will be.
To ensure that mistakes and human errors are eliminated, you can use an email marketing tool to communicate with your audience. This tool should handle branded emails easily and provide you with insights into how successful your communication is.
One of the best email marketing tools you can use on your Windows computer is MailChimp. It comes with different features and allows you to integrate other tools such as Salesforce, Twitter, and Google, among others.
Powerpoint
Powerpoint is one of the most common tools used to run a webinar from a Windows computer. However, the success of your webinar will not be determined by Powerpoint, but by how the Powerpoint tool is used.
Even though most webinar providers allow you to use Powerpoint, they restrict you to static slides without animations or videos. This is where your webinar will fail. Instead, choose a webinar provider that does not limit the features you can use with Powerpoint.
You can record and capture demonstrations using Powerpoint and then embed them in your webinar presentation. You can also make high-demand presentations with pre-designed templates using a Powerpoint tool such as SlideModel.
Video and Audio Tools for Windows
Finally, you will need to make sure that you have working video and audio tools for your Windows machine. Most laptops come with an inbuilt camera and audio tools, but you have to ensure that they are working well.
If not, you can get an external webcam and headset that match your video and audio requirements. These tools are not expensive, but you can end up spending a lot of money depending on what you need.
You might also have to invest in an image editing tool. This is essential for those who need to edit images for their webinars.
The success of your webinar can be determined by the tools you use to prepare and run the webinar. The tools discussed above are essential for those running webinars from their Windows computers.
