CMO Checklist Before Buying a Webinar Platform

• Define Webinar Goals: Set your primary goal for the webinar. Decide what you want to achieve through the webinar. Create leads, educate your audience, or market your company’s products or services. Subsequently, understand your target audience and their needs.
  
  
• Set your budget: Following the webinar objective, set your webinar budget. Discuss with the CFO or budget manager and determine how much you will spend on a webinar platform. Examine if there is a requirement. Are you ready to pay extra for additional features?
  
  
• Do Research on the Webinar Platform: Explore some webinar platforms online before picking one. It is a good idea to do some research before making a purchase. You can also take recommendations from your colleagues or experts to choose a superior webinar platform as per your needs.  
  
  
• Check Feedback and Reviews: Read feedback and reviews from other businesses that have used a similar platform. It helps in identifying possible platform problems such as bugs, glitches, or poor customer support. You will get to know the pain points and their overall experience with the platform.
  
  
• Trial Session and Demos: Take a free demo or trial session to check how the platform works. Get yourself familiar with the platform’s features and functionalities. The trial session helps understand the user-friendly interface and unique features of the platform, ensuring it is easy to use for both attendees and hosts.
  
  
• Security and Privacy: The webinar platforms collect and store sensitive data like personal information, enrollment details, and more. So always make sure that the chosen platform has necessary security features like data encryption, password protection, etc. As you know, a secure platform always protects us from unauthorized access, data breaches, and cyber threats.
  
  
• Engagement Features: The engagement features help capture and maintain the audience’s attention. See if interactive features are available on the webinar platform, like polls, Q&A, and live chat. Check to see if you can easily share presentations and other resources during the webinar. For example, if you want to provide something important to your attendees, you can share it with them, and attendees will download it in either CSV or PDF formats. 
  
  
• Analytics and Reporting: Make sure that the platform has analytics and reporting tools like attendee engagement, registration data, audience interaction, and other relevant metrics. Analytics will let you understand the overall performance of the webinars. The data also helps identify the ROI of the webinars.
  
  
• Check Technical Support: Technical support is crucial for ensuring that webinars run smoothly and effectively. As you know, technical issues can occur anytime during the live event, like audio issues, streaming errors, registration problems, etc., so it would be better to have a responsive technical support team in the backend. 
  
  
• Customization Options: A well-customized webinar platform always makes the user experience enjoyable for attendees. Every business has different needs, so many webinar platforms offer advanced branding and customization options. Companies can modify their brand color, font, themes, and other elements through customization options.
  
  
• Integrations with Marketing Tools: Make sure the chosen platform integrates with current marketing tools like Slack, CRM, and other relevant tools. You can smoothly automate tasks through marketing tools like collecting applications, sending reminders, and more. This way, you can save time and provide a better user experience for your attendees.

Conclusion

The right webinar platform always makes an event memorable and successful. It creates engaging and interactive webinar events that will help you achieve your business goals. Follow all of the points above before purchasing a webinar platform. It will assist you in finding the best webinar platform that can provide a great experience for your attendees.