How to Maximize Results when Delivering Webinars
Recorded webinars are great for generating leads. Especially when people can’t attend a live webinar due to timing or sudden changes to their schedules and priorities.
One way of recapturing those leads is by sharing a link to the recorded webinar. The link is shared by email with the hope that the recipients watch the video and continue on to convert to a qualified lead.
It’s so important to do this right if you want to achieve your business objectives which are most likely to drive sales leads, establish your credibility, and/or educate your existing customers.
56% of webinars are viewed on demand
Dropbox, YouTube, Google Drive, Vimeo and Zoom Cloud don't work
In-depth Analysis
Overview
Today we are focusing on Webinar Delivery. It’s so important to do this right if you want to achieve your business objectives which are most likely to drive sales leads, establish your credibility, and/or educate your existing customers.
So, you worked for weeks on your webinar to deliver high value content to your audience and showcase your expertise. The presentation was a masterpiece and your audience was highly engaged. That’s fantastic!
Now it’s time to send the recorded webinar to the attendees and those that weren’t able to make it. You upload the video to YouTube, DropBox, Google Drive, Zoom Cloud, or Vimeo, you grab the share link and send it out to everyone via email. Right? Wrong. That’s not going to get you the results you want and let me show you precisely why.
It’s painfully obvious once you take a look at this experience from the perspective of your viewers.
I mentioned a number of the most common platforms companies are using for webinar delivery so let’s just go through them and see what the problems are. You might be surprised.
YouTube
Let’s start with YouTube… Great for discovering cat videos, bad choice for webinar delivery.
Here’s an actual webinar that Stripe recently sent out. A nice email, it says “watch the online event”, great, click the link, and this is what you get: an unlisted video on YouTube.
Immediately you are forced to watch an ad for some completely unrelated product or service, or it could even be for a competitor of yours!
Nobody wants to watch that. It’s intrusive, it’s irritating, and can trigger what’s called a negativity bias with the content they are about to watch, leaving them more likely to remember how irritated they were than the content of your webinar, which is definitely not how you want to start off.
In addition to the video ad, there are multiple paid ads on the side here that are specifically designed to grab your viewer’s attention away from your video.
And if those ads weren't enough of a distraction, YouTube’s algorithm went and found a bunch of other videos that would most likely be of interest to you, and most likely to steal your attention away from whatever it is you’re watching, and placed it right here next to your video.
So if your viewer already has a short attention span, they’ll be no match for YouTube’s attention stealing tactics. Your viewer will have clicked on some other video before you even finish your introduction.
Also, this unlisted link is publicly accessible. So you have to be absolutely sure that you weren’t discussing or displaying anything that you don’t want the entire world to know. That’s a little scary.
They do have a private viewing option but it’s really only practical for one-off deliveries, not mass distribution.
And, if you want viewers to be able to watch content offline, they will need to pay for a YouTube Premium subscription. What a terrible experience!
As you can see, YouTube’s forced ads, distractions by recommending other videos, lack of privacy options, and lack of free offline viewing makes it a non-starter for effective webinar delivery.
Dropbox
Let’s take a look at another popular option, DropBox.
You’re probably thinking “this is perfect!”, no ads and viewers can easily download the videos.
Well the first problem with DropBox is that it is not a video platform!
Why is that so important? Well video is a very complex format, and in order to provide a great playback experience on all device types with various bandwidth constraints, each video must be encoded into multiple resolutions, bitrates, and codecs, and delivered in a specific streaming format that has over 100 settings configured just right.
Platforms that are purpose-built for video will usually implement this correctly, and most importantly, have appropriately factored the necessary costs into their business model.
However, platforms that try to add video playback as an afterthought, where it’s not really a core feature of the platform, discover how costly it is to do it the right way, and instead of raising their prices to compensate, they just cut lots of corners which results in a significantly diminished viewer experience.
You’ll see this a lot with file sharing platforms, content management systems, and nearly every platform that’s not purpose-built for video. DropBox is one of those platforms.
So where did DropBox cut corners? Well to start, the quality only goes up to 720p, which is only 44% the size of full HD, and 11% the size of 4K resolution. Not only that, but the bitrate is extremely low at these resolutions, making it look heavily pixelated which is a big distraction for most viewers.
So this company, Q1 Productions, delivered their webinar by sending out a share link to a DropBox folder, so that the video and any accompanying program materials could be found all in one place. Sounds reasonable, but the presentation is pretty lackluster, and the video is just zoom_0.mp4. Wow, that’s really engaging right there.
Also, it seems logistically it was easier for them to send out a public link that anyone can view, you don’t even need to be signed into an account, which is kind of ironic coming from a company that prides itself in working with private content for highly regulated industries. Not sure who’s more at fault there, DropBox for not making it easier to distribute it privately, or the company who sent it out.
So if you are looking to distract your viewers with heavily compressed video playback, and underwhelm them with the presentation, DropBox might be for you. For everyone else, let’s move on to another option.
Google Drive
Next up is Google Drive
Very similar to DropBox in that it is a file sharing platform, not a video platform!
You would think that because Google owns YouTube, they would be able to provide a great experience for videos delivered with Google Drive. You would be wrong. This is most likely because Google is in a competitive price war with the other cloud storage providers. If they had to do everything necessary to provide a great video experience across all devices, and couldn’t spew ads all over them, it would completely eviscerate any profit margin. So, what you end up with is a poor viewer experience for videos delivered with Google Drive.
First off, unlike YouTube, Google limits the number of daily views of videos on Google Drive, and this limit varies daily depending on their server load, so you have no idea if that day your viewers will get an error that the number of allowed playbacks has been exceeded. That’s a terrible experience, happens to companies and educators all the time, and is something your viewers won’t see if you deliver with a proper video platform.
The quality of their encoding is average, looks similar to YouTube, but their maximum resolution is capped at 1080p.
This company, Forecastr, just sends their webinar out as a public link to a video on Google Drive, no protection, not secure. You try to download it, and immediately get a warning that it can’t be scanned for viruses because it’s too big and a tiny button to ‘download anyways’. Although informative, a little anxiety-inducing even with a trusted source.
Also, the presentation is as basic as it gets. Just a link to a file. You could also share a folder with multiple videos, but it lacks professionalism and you certainly won’t be getting the same level of engagement as you would using a platform that has a presentation layer for the content where you could add call to actions, deliver multiple webinars to a single library, etc.
So just to recap, Google Drive has a view limit that varies daily, so you’re taking a big risk there. Playback resolution is capped at 1080p, which may work for most people, but not for those wanting to deliver 4K or higher. Encoding quality is average, but not suitable for premium content. No presentation layer to increase engagement or drive a call to action, and a lack of professionalism for webinar delivery.
Zoom Cloud
Next we have Zoom Cloud
If you recorded your webinar using Zoom, Zoom Cloud may look like a viable solution for delivery.
Just a heads up, Zoom’s Pro and Business plans only include a small 5 GB of cloud storage which translates into anywhere from 5 to 13 hours of video depending on the resolution and content. You’ll likely exceed that after a few webinars and need to pay for their relatively pricey additional storage. There is no quota that refreshes monthly or annually, so as your library of webinars grows, so will your monthly bill.
By default, any video recording delivered with Zoom requires a passcode to access. Although this may seem like the simplest form of protection, it’s kind of annoying that you have to always reference the email to get that passcode, and if you send multiple videos with Zoom, trying to manage all those passcodes starts to become a real mess.
In general, it’s actually more secure and less annoying to just require authentication to view something instead of a passcode. Zoom does have options to require authentication to view cloud recordings, but they make it so confusing, I’m not sure how they expect anyone to figure it out. First, you’ll notice they have a setting to allow only authenticated users to view. This may sound like exactly what you want, but this actually requires that the user viewing the content be added to your company account… which is not what you want.
There is also an option to enable “View recording on demand” in the share settings, which doesn’t make any sense since viewing anything that isn’t live is on-demand, but apparently when enabled this requires the viewer to register before viewing. This sounds like more of what we want, but in order to control who views the content and actually make it secure, you must change the settings to manually approve registrants.
So if you think about that process:
you first send all the viewers the same link to the video.
Second, they register to view the video when they get around to it.
Third, you see that request come through in your email then you go approve it when you get around to it.
And last, the viewer can actually watch it.
So just by trying to make it more secure and less annoying, you made it more annoying as now they have to wait for approval after registering. This shouldn’t be so complicated! I should just be able to deliver it to a list of email addresses and be done.
Another issue is that when a zoom video is sent to someone, it doesn’t get added to their zoom library. The viewer always has to dig through their email to find the link. And if you sent them multiple zoom recordings, or maybe they received zoom recordings from other sources as well, now that makes it increasingly difficult for them to remember just the right search terms in their email to locate the webinar they are looking for.
You are decreasing the chances of them successfully finding your webinar by delivering it in this way. Also, it’s just a link to the video. There are some download options and chat history which are nice, but no call to action, and no cohesive delivery of multiple videos.
And there’s no quality selector for the video, so hopefully their player picks the right one for you because you’re stuck with it. Not that it will make much of a difference though, since even their highest quality averages less than 1 Megabit per second, which is extremely low.
So just to recap:
you’ll likely need more than the included 5 GB cloud storage and their additional storage pricing is somewhat pricey.
Their default passcode protection of videos is a hassle to deal with from the viewer’s perspective.
There’s no streamlined delivery process for their more secure and less annoying authenticated access.
Videos do not get added to the user’s library, requiring them to go hunting through emails to view each time.
There’s no cohesive delivery of multiple videos.
And the encoding quality is super low.
Let’s move on to another option.
Vimeo
The last one we’ll be covering is Vimeo.
They’ve been around forever, they’re purpose-built for video sharing, and cater more to professionals and creatives. Because of this, the video streaming and encoding quality is very good. They do offer video portfolio pages as a way to showcase multiple videos, but let's take a look at the most common delivery method, a link directly to a video page.
Tackle.io sent an email out for their webinar with a Vimeo link. Let’s check it out.
And now just look at this! For maximum results, you need the viewer’s undivided attention with a clear call to action, and this is probably one of the worst offenders. Where am I supposed to put my attention? What am I supposed to do? What is the call to action?
Here we have play, but on top of the video I have this large pop-up prompting me to join free and log in with Google. So do I do that before or during the video? Regardless, I need to divert my attention to it because it’s blocking part of the damn video.
So I close it, but now what? We have this navigation bar across the top with bright colors grabbing my attention trying to get me to join or log in, search through all the other videos hosted on Vimeo, start going through all of Vimeo’s marketing pages and contact their sales team.
And this isn’t something you only see on a free plan. This company is on a paid plan! Look! They are paying money for their videos to be presented with all this garbage Vimeo advertising plastered everywhere: Sign up for Vimeo! Join Vimeo now! Check out other videos on Vimeo! Learn all about Vimeo and our pricing! Oh wait, scroll down, here’s a huge ad in bright pink to grab your attention for you guessed it… Vimeo!
Definitely avoid this method of delivery as it is unprofessional and full of distractions.
Conclusion
Well that covers all the most common platforms you shouldn’t be using for webinar delivery. Fortunately there are better solutions out there.
Before we get into that, let’s identify the three key attributes needed to achieve maximum results with your business objectives.
First, and possibly the most important, determine if there is any private or sensitive information in your video, and if so, make sure your delivery requires some type of authentication to view. You need to stop using public links to your videos, including “unlisted” YouTube links, if you want to keep it private. If you don’t, you are setting yourself up for failure. And for reference, a public link is one that anyone can type or copy and paste into a browser to access it, making it super easy to share with others.
Second, distraction-free viewing. We saw the utter madness of YouTube and Vimeo vomiting ads all over the page, trying their hardest to grab the attention away from your video. You might be attracted to the free or low cost of these solutions, but it’s not really free, is it? They make their money by luring your viewers away from your content so that they spend money on something else instead of what you’re offering. Those free options are likely costing you more money than what you would spend on an ad free solution.
Third, create an amazing experience for your viewers. You may not realize it, but subconsciously in their mind, the experience of the webinar recording is a direct reflection of how you treat your customers. If the experience is bad, they will just expect more of the same with whatever else it is you are offering. But if you knock the experience out of the park, it makes a great impression, keeps them engaged, and significantly improves your success rate. So how exactly do you create an amazing experience? Let’s keep it simple:
High quality video playback. View limits and pixelated, overly compressed, or freezing videos will quickly kill an otherwise great experience. Again, use a platform purpose-built for video.
A professional presentation of one or more videos. This can be achieved with a menu system or video wall or some kind of page customized for the content they are viewing.
A call to action. Your presentation page or video should support a clear call to action. This puts your viewer at ease knowing what the next step is, almost as if you are holding their hand, guiding them. It’s a very positive and pleasant experience.
Make it easily accessible. The webinar shouldn’t be buried as a link in some email. The viewer could have tons of emails with webinar links, whether they are multiple webinars of yours, or webinars from other companies as well. They should be able to go to one location and easily see all the videos you delivered to them.
Support for additional files, if you have them. If you will be providing additional documents or materials along with your webinar, the files should be located in the same place as the video, again, not buried in some email in a separate location.
And that’s it! Stay tuned for part 2 of this series where we take a look at one possible solution that solves the mess of problems we discussed.