Webinars (online seminars) have become ubiquitous across essentially every industry as a powerful way to share informational videos with a worldwide, virtual audience. At the same time, organizations are discovering the many added benefits of on-demand webinars, such as extending the utility of live webinars, increasing brand awareness, and generating more leads.
On-demand webinars differ from live webinars, or even online videos, in several ways. Understanding these differences is key to producing on-demand content that serves the needs of online viewers while helping to achieve your organization’s goals.
Jump to:
- What are “on-demand webinars”?
- Why create on-demand webinars?
- Benefits of on-demand webinars for attendees
- On-demand webinars features and user-engagement
- Learn more about Kaltura’s webinar platform
- Final Thoughts
What are “on-demand webinars”?
On-demand webinars may be the recordings of live webinars that have been edited and then published online for those who did not attend the live event (and repeat viewing for those who did), or they may be webinars that have been recorded without an audience and uploaded for viewers to watch at their convenience. An advantage of webinars recorded without an audience is the ability to shoot multiple takes, then edit together the best ones. Types of webinars include workshops, classes, panel discussions, and even employee training videos.
Effective on-demand webinars are further edited to remove the unavoidable delays, technical difficulties, and other disruptions that are typical with live webinars. This improves clarity and makes for a more enjoyable viewing experience. On-demand webinars can be augmented with titles, captioning, translations, and more.
Why create on-demand webinars?
Creating on-demand webinars allows your business to reach a far larger segment of the public with your message. This is because, over time, many more people will have a chance to discover and consume the content, as opposed to broadcasting the webinar once to the people who are both aware of it and also available to view it at that exact time. This is why as long as your organization is already creating live webinars for your market, then there is a strong incentive to record your live events and repurpose them as on-demand. It’s an efficient way to extend the life of the content and increase the return on investment (ROI) for the time and money spent to produce the live event in the first place.
Video is great for search engine optimization (SEO). Google and other search engines prioritize sites with video for a few reasons. Mainly, Google wants to serve its users relevant results with quality media if available. If the search engine can present a video thumbnail next to the link, that increases the chances that users will click on it. Additionally, users spend more time on average on sites with videos, since watching the videos takes time, which tells search engines that people find the site’s content engaging. Another reason is that video content is more likely to be linked from another site (this is known as a backlink), which greatly improves site SEO. What this all means is that incorporating on-demand webinars can be a fruitful strategy for driving increased traffic to your site.
On-demand webinars are great marketing tools. They attract viewers to your brand, thereby increasing awareness, while simultaneously providing your company with promising leads. This is because on-demand webinars often require registration, including name and contact information, to view them. Assuming your content is relevant to your industry, it stands to reason that those who register are part of your target market. Plus, once viewers are engaging with your content, the opportunity is created to convert them through your unique value proposition and well-placed calls to action.
Beyond the viewers’ contact information, on-demand content can be used to collect market data. Platforms like Kaltura offer advanced analytics that measure user engagement not only on each webinar but also on specific sections of each webinar, making it clear where your audience’s interests lie.
Benefits of on-demand webinars for attendees
The clearest benefit of on-demand webinars for attendees is that they can watch the content whenever is most convenient for them. Oftentimes, people may register for a live event and later realize that it conflicts with their schedule, or perhaps an unexpected obligation, and forgo attending altogether. With a worldwide audience, it’s also highly likely that a live event is scheduled for an unsuitable hour for many people who would otherwise be interested, due to time zone differences. With on-demand webinars, on the other hand, viewers have complete flexibility to experience the content whenever they choose.
Also, viewers have the option to pause, rewind, or fast forward to the parts of the video they find most interesting. This both improves the viewing experience and yields useful insights for the creators of the webinar since they can see what material on average was most interesting to the audience, and which parts received less attention.
Finally, with on-demand content, viewers have the option to share links to it with their social media and email contacts if they find it valuable. This, too, benefits the content creator as well, organically increasing the reach of the webinar through word-of-mouth.
On-demand webinars features and user-engagement
A great feature of on-demand is that it affords creators the ability to edit and improve the webinar before putting it online. This could include anything from music to graphics to animations and beyond. It’s the reason that on-demand webinars are frequently more entertaining and professional looking than live ones.
Engaging viewers through on-demand webinars often requires a different approach than with live webinars. For example, live webinars have the advantage of allowing participants to interact with the presenters–and each other–through quick polls, Q&A’s, and breakout rooms. This is not the case when watching a recording.
One way to overcome this is to share useful links and downloadable materials throughout the webinar. Another is to incorporate questions or quizzes for the audience. Although they can’t answer the speaker directly, presenting questions helps to keep viewers focused on the material and make it feel more interactive.
After the webinar concludes, each viewer can automatically be emailed a follow-up survey, making the presentation feel even more personal. Follow-up surveys create another touchpoint with the viewer, an opportunity to interact with a prospective user to convey your brand’s message. The responses, meanwhile, provide additional insights about your audience and content.
Learn more about Kaltura’s webinar platform
Kaltura Webinars is a convenient platform to plan, present, and record any type of webinar for use as on-demand content. In addition to Kaltura’s reliable HD streaming and advanced moderator controls, webinars can be easily customized with your organization’s branding and then automatically recorded to the cloud. For live webinars with participants, Kaltura makes it possible to conduct live quizzes and audience polls, which are then preserved in the recordings so that on-demand viewers can also benefit from the information.
The platform has different plans for any size webinar and makes it easy to craft professional presentations with the help of useful tools like an automatically generated landing page for registrations, a minisite to which your on-demand recordings are uploaded (same link as the live webinar), digital whiteboards, and multimedia playlists for slide decks, documents, and audiovisual material. Once your recordings are shared online, Kaltura’s VOD advanced analytics track their performance and consistently report valuable data back to your organization.
Final Thoughts
On-demand webinars allow any organization to vastly increase the reach of its message by drawing viewers both around the world and around the clock. Not all webinars are indeed suitable for on-demand viewing. For example, those containing rapidly updating information or tied to a specific one-time event are unlikely to appeal to viewers after the fact. However, the majority of webinars are considered evergreen, meaning the information remains relevant long after the live presentation has been recorded. Those types of webinars offer long-term value to both their creators and the public by being made available on demand. Organizations that utilize on-demand content are able to continuously engage with their target online audience without relying solely on live broadcasts to draw participants. Over time, this results in more views, more market data, more engagement, and ultimately, more conversions.
On-demand or live, Kaltura Webinars are all about the experience.
