Consider these situations—Do you struggle with low attendance in training sessions and product demonstrations? Are your representatives tired of traveling to client locations to give demos? Is it tough to manage training sessions for your vast customer base?

If you are facing any of these challenges, you should consider webinar software.

Webinars (or web-based seminars) are fast becoming a common term in business and education sectors. It's defined as online presentations, conferences, or workshops that are delivered as video conferences.

Unlike traditional conferences, webinars don't require attendees to travel to a particular location, saving their time and money. As webinars are delivered online, you can invite a large number of attendees at once, without worrying about any real estate cost.

By conducting online webinars, you will achieve two goals simultaneously: You will save time and money spent on travel and improve the engagement levels of your business presentations.

This guide aims to help businesses like yours select the right webinar software. Here's what we'll cover:

• What is webinar software?

• Common features of webinar software

• What type of buyer are you?

• Benefits of webinar software

• Market trends to understand

What is webinar software?

Webinar software is a tool for hosting online presentations, conferences, discussions, and meetings. The software lets you manage attendee lists, send attendees their credentials and access codes to log into the sessions, as well as establish collaboration among hosts and attendees via chat and Q&A sessions.

The key functions of a webinar solution include the following:

• Hosting webinars on cloud and providing attendees a portal to access the session.

• Authorizing attendees using credentials and access codes.

• Providing a chat interface for in-session collaboration among attendees.

• Recording attendee feedback after each session.

Hosting a live webinar in WebNinja (Source)

Common features of webinar software

The first step before purchasing a webinar solution is to understand the common features. This knowledge will help you shortlist products based on the capabilities, ensuring that the software you choose performs all the functions you desire.

In this section, we'll list the common features of webinar software. Review this list, select the features based on your business needs, and shortlist products accordingly.

What type of buyer are you?

After learning about the product features, the next step is to understand the types of webinar software buyers. Each type of buyer has their own needs, for which reason, vendors offer differentiated products that suit different buyer type.

According to our research, there are primarily two types of buyers of webinar solutions:

Local businesses and multinational corporations. These buyers need webinar software to manage presentations for their departments or a few customers. For instance, companies could organize business and compliance training for employees. These buyers should invest in a solution that lets them send email invitations with easy access and login.

Events management companies. These buyers usually host webinars as part of events that involve a large number of customers or attendees. For instance, product updates are usually accompanied by global webinars to apprise customers, while annual shareholder meetings inform shareholders about a company's revenue and financial strategy. These buyers should invest in a solution that offers event management functionality.

Benefits of webinar software

The next step in the purchase process is to find out the benefits of webinar software, so that you can assess the software's usefulness for your business. This information will help you present a strong case to your stakeholders for purchasing the software.

Here are the key benefits of webinar software:

Ease of access for attendees. Attendees can connect to your webinars from anywhere by signing with their credentials or event-specific access code. Some vendors offer mobile apps that let attendees access webinars from their smartphones. This ease-of-access boosts attendance and eliminates any travel or logistics costs.

Collect and analyze feedback more effectively. To make your webinars effective, it's important to collect feedback and regularly analyze the performance of your sessions. Webinar software lets you send digital feedback forms to attendees right after the session, thereby maximizing survey participation.

In-session collaboration. Webinar software also helps you improve collaboration between hosts and attendees. It provides participants a chat interface for posting comments and questions during a session. Hosts can also share files with the audience and conduct Q&A sessions after the webinar.

Market trends to understand

Audience engagement is a key determiner of a webinar's success, which has pushed vendors to explore ways for optimizing engagement.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) are two technologies that webinar software vendors are working to incorporate. While AI can help businesses identify areas of improvement for webinar content, AR/VR improves the attendee experience by emulating a live session for remote attendees.

In this section, we'll discuss each trend in detail. To ensure the long-term success of your preferred webinar tool, ensure that the vendors you shortlist plan to incorporate these technologies into their products.

AI to optimize webinar content. The technology can analyze parameters, such as attendance, topics, duration of the webinar, in-webinar chat messages, and hand raises, to understand engagement levels during a webinar. This data can help in developing best practices to create and present webinars. For instance, based on historical performance, the AI tool suggests an optimal duration for each topic so that webinar creators can limit presentations to get maximum attention. With small businesses increasingly adopting AI, we expect it to become a core offering by 2022.

AR/VR-assisted training is the next big thing. In some instances, attendees feel that webinars are impersonal because everything is online. Attending sessions in-person offers a different experience that not all webinars can emulate. In such cases, the issue can be solved with AR/VR. The technologies enable attendees to view trainers, other attendees, the presentation screen, hand gestures, body language, and animations as if they were actually present in the session. With many vendors, such as 360 Immersive and Tesseract, making headway in this area, we expect AR/VR to become a core webinar software functionality by 2023.