Webinars are an extraordinary tool for event organisers, businesses and organisations. They have all the flexibility needed to support a wide range of activities: training courses, product presentations, team meetings, conferences. Often the only limits to what you can do with a webinar are the imagination of whoever is organising it and the technology behind the platform being used.
They also have three big advantages:
- they cost less, because they cut many costs: hospitality and travel for speakers (who can even stay at home, or be invited to recording and broadcasting studios that are closer and more convenient), room hire and room management, and the costs asked of attendees, in money as well as in time.
- they are quick and easy to organise and can therefore be used in real time to meet the need to update, inform or engage different audiences.
- they are “smart” because, resting on a strong technological base already, they can be enriched with further tools that run on the same devices people are watching from (from chat to polls, from surveys to matchmaking and networking tools) with no need for additional technology.
On top of that, as we have pointed out several times, they produce a great deal of data and therefore help both organisers and everyone with related interests (funders and sponsors, for example) to assess their return on investment and to generate further business.
So why are you reading an article about why you should not run webinars, you may be wondering?
Because, in our view, even the most powerful tools are not necessarily right for every occasion. Sometimes there are options that are more useful, better performing and more profitable for the budget they require. And, as you will know if you have been following us for a while, we are not interested in selling at any cost (even though we do, as it happens, have a webinar platform, and we have written here, here and here about how to get the best out of this tool). We care more about selling the right products to the right people and the right companies. Only then do they get results and do we get the satisfaction, along with loyal customers who tend to stay with us.
So here are three situations, taken directly from our experience over the last few weeks, in which we think a webinar is not the way to go. Or rather, in which the webinar is simply not the right tool for the job, compared with others that are not necessarily more complicated or more expensive, especially given the benefits they bring.
1. Space and the way it is organised are central to the experience of the event you are planning
This is the most classic case, the one that comes closest to the physical experience of traditional events: here the event, to work at its best, needs to use — even when it is online — multiple spaces with different characteristics, set aside for different functions. You need a room for the plenary, smaller rooms for group work, an exhibition area for the stands and lounges for relaxation and networking. In cases like these the webinar, however agile and “smart”, soon shows all its limits, in favour of more advanced technical set-ups such as those behind virtual events. And we are not talking about headsets and metaverses. We simply mean good-looking virtual spaces, perhaps personalised and unique, suited to the activities they have to host and able to generate the engagement and the attention that make the experience genuinely rich for everyone.
2. There is a clear advantage (in terms of relationships, image or status) in differentiating the ways people take part in the event
There are situations — you know them better than we do — in which differentiating memberships, and therefore statuses, access rights and what attendees are able to do and see becomes at least as important as having the most interesting content and the best-performing technology. Here too, the differentiation of content a webinar can offer is often quantitative rather than qualitative, in favour of stronger options such as hybrid events, where an in-person part, perhaps in an exclusive location for a small group of people, is balanced by the chance to have a similar experience — though not an identical one — comfortably from home, possibly even on demand.
3. You need people to interact with your products or services
The last example is something of a spin-off from the first, but with its own features. It covers all those situations in which space matters not so much in relational terms as in commercial ones. We are talking about trade fairs, the situations where two elements are generally present at once: many sellers and many buyers who come to compare offers and buy what is, for them, the best product or service. In all these cases the environment in which relationships are built, the “setting”, is as much a part of the selling and buying process when it is physical as when it is virtual. And so the ability, once again, to combine the buying experience with the experience of choosing — being able to move “physically” back and forth through a space without leaving home — to assess the furnishing and the branding of the spaces and the richness of the materials, and to be able (why not) to explore a stand on your own, without a salesperson right behind you but available if needed, all becomes an integral part of the experience and makes the difference.
In all three of these cases the webinar is not the right solution because, for all its great potential, it fails to put at the centre of attention exactly those distinctive features of the event that make the difference to the experience of attendees and investors. Using it at the expense of tools that work better, and that are not necessarily more expensive or harder to manage, therefore becomes a waste.
So why does it happen? Often because webinars, whether through familiarity or through sheer popularity, are the first thing that comes to mind. Often because we think they are the best compromise between cost and performance. Often because we are in a hurry. Or sometimes because we have not yet found anyone who can build with us the best solution for creating the event we really want, without going mad and without wasting money and resources.
If that is the case, you know you can start telling us about your next event simply by clicking the button below, don’t you?