Hosting A Webinar? Don't Use Microsoft Teams
At your MSP, you are getting prepared to host your first webinar. You have a few people who are already interested, and you are excited about getting an opportunity to educate your customers. Your customers have been asking many questions recently, and you feel you have a significant amount of information you can share on a webinar.
Preparing for A Webinar
Hosting webinars is a great starting point to promote your managed IT services, educate your existing clients on your services and products, highlight your expertise, and inform your prospects of how your services can take their business to greater heights. The customer journey is what your existing clients and your prospects experience interacting with your services and sales. Webinars can help MSPs elevate the customer journey at any stage.
With webinars, you can generate interest in your services and products among your leads and keep your existing clients engaged. Here are some ways your MSP can benefit from webinars:
Prospects can become clients
When you host a webinar for your prospective clients, you do not have to immediately talk about your services. We recommend that you educate your viewers and your listeners, and address common customer pain points.
Inform existing clients of updates to existing services or introduce new services
If you have been looking for a new way to introduce and sell your new services or updated services to your clients, a webinar is an effective way to do this. If you want to inform clients about the benefits of switching to the cloud or the importance of implementing a backup and disaster recovery plan, you can host a webinar.
Educate and elevate your clients
You can reduce some of the pressures and burdens members of your support teams are feeling by hosting educational webinars. During your educational webinars, you can use this opportunity to explain to your clients and your prospective clients about the services you provide and how they can be used to improve their operations.
Hosting a Webinar
Congratulations on preparing to host a webinar. It is indeed a great resource to help educate prospective clients and existing clients, so we commend you for taking this step. We understand hosting a webinar can seem like a huge challenge, especially when there are so many resources and tools available. While you will not be able to control everything in a webinar, there is a step you can take to make sure your webinar runs as smoothly as possible.
One of the most important things you need to do is choose the right video conferencing platform to host your webinar. In terms of current applications within businesses and organizations across the globe, it often comes down to Microsoft Teams, Webinar, and Zoom. A reason many businesses and organizations use Teams could be out of familiarity and convenience, as Teams comes included with Office 365.
Avoid Microsoft Teams
While Microsoft Teams will seem like the best option because it comes included with Office 365 and easily integrates into the system, it is not the best platform for hosting Webinars. Microsoft Teams can be a struggle with larger groups, and webinar hosting will require its own license. Microsoft Teams is also not immediately compatible with some programs.
Microsoft Teams also consumes a significant amount of space that will result and slow and laggy performances. Even if Teams is the only program you have open, you can be limited. For example, if you needed to unmute, you may have to press the button and wait a few seconds before you can speak. Many businesses and organizations have experienced struggles deploying Teams and supporting it. While many may not want to admit it, many users are only using Teams because they feel they have to or because it is convenient to do so.
What Platform Should I Use?
We know that switching to a new tool is not easy because it takes time for people to get adjusted. That said, if the benefits of one platform are worth it, the switch will outweigh the time and effort it takes for users to get acclimated to the new tool. So, if Microsoft Teams is not our preferred option for webinars, what do we suggest? We suggest any other platform, such as Zoom.
One of the great things about Zoom is the quality of the videos and audio. For live webinars, you can record them locally on your own computer, and this will result in better quality. Since the local recording is highly quality, there will be no compression of the audio. Zoom is a jack-of-all-trades platform that works with more devices than any other video conferencing platform. Zoom can be used for internal communication and external personal use. Zoom is better suited for webinars and online teaching, whereas Teams may be more suitable for communication and collaboration projects.
Zoom has more webinar features available and zoom offers large conferencing and dial-in features that can be used instantly. If you need to increase your maximum webinar limit, you will only need to obtain a license upgrade, there will be no need to bring in additional hardware or servers.
If your MSP is looking for a webinar hosting tool, and you want to avoid the extra cost and complexity, Zoom should be at the top of your list. Webinars have proven to be an inexpensive and effective way to educate your prospective clients and your existing clients. Webinars can promote your services and grab the attention of your target audience.
Hosting a webinar can seem like a daunting task in the beginning, however, it can be recorded and placed on your website for as long as you want. This will make it one of the most efficient and effective resources you have for your target audience. We encourage MSPs to use webinars to promote their business, but we also encourage them to be informed on the best steps to take when planning and hosting a webinar.
If you are preparing to host a webinar, and you are considering using Microsoft Teams, take a step back and go in a different direction. Engage with Ulistic as their trusted digital marketing firm. For more information on planning and hosting webinars, contact us today at (863) 591-3576.
One more thing...have you built your PR kit yet? Check out this cool article from Respona.
| 
