The video meeting and webinar software business has boomed since 2020, becoming a multi-billion dollar business (over US$6 billion as of 2021) and the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, which saw global lockdown mandates and general advice to work from home wherever possible.

Paid plans for your best webinars?

Before that time, video conferencing tended to be the province of large multinational companies. As a result, they could not easily manage the logistics of organizing in-person meetings between all the participants involved. Also, home-working was reluctantly permitted on an individual basis.

The pandemic transformed the business world, giving work-from-home and flexible working immense and unexpected boosts. One upside of this is that wary management has realized that their employees can work effectively from home, representing an immense overhead saving.

Small and medium-scale businesses have embraced the online world. Many use free webinar software to host meetings, unveil new procedures and get progress updates on current projects. But these companies should jump to a paid plan for their webinar software. Let’s examine some reasons why:

You can have unlimited participants

Most free software comes with certain pre-sets and limits. For example, it can be limits on the length of time a meeting can be held to the number of participants who can attend. While this is adequate for some businesses, ending a meeting early can be exceedingly unprofessional because the time permitted is up. Or to find that key staff members cannot join the meeting because all the allowed slots are already filled.

Introducing your full management team, the sales team, legal personnel, and anyone else who might be useful to seal the deal will give negotiators the confidence to persist in seeking out the best deal for the company.

This also applies to knowing that discussions can continue for as long as necessary and that the meeting will not arbitrarily shut down after an hour and a half.

By the way, MyOwnConference offers different types of paid plans. And it depends on you how much you will pay for the webinar room.

Longer recordings

To run longer meetings, a paid webinar service plan will also allow recording important meetings, no matter how long they run. This can be vital with tricky contracts as the fine details must be hashed out and documented very precisely. Understanding the recordings in detail is sometimes necessary to ensure that you account for all the points and note all nuances.

Create evergreen content

A follow-on advantage to the above is the ability to create and store evergreen content. Evergreen content is that which does not date quickly and thus can be used over and over. Good examples of these are training webinars, which all new employees must undertake, and — in some cases — current employees will need to refresh.

Having crisp, high-quality recordings easily accessible by everyone who needs the information can be an enormous help to the HR department in ensuring that everyone has the skills and information needed to be legally compliant and au fait with company policies.

Multiple presenters

Free webinar software usually allows for one host. But in practice, many webinars need to have more than one host, especially if it is a large meeting. While the host can mute microphones to prevent unwanted interruptions, secondary hosts should be available to help people with a range of problems that they might face, such as:

• Finding the meeting
• Sorting out their technology
• Having problems with hearing or vision-impaired assistance

Another host or mediator should be available to field any questions that pop up on the online chat feature. Either he should answer them directly, saving them to ask the speaker at the end, or use private host channels to bring them discreetly to the speaker’s attention.

These extra hands in the meeting help everyone to feel that their contributions are valuable and stave off all kinds of frustrations.

Tailored hosting

Once again, following on from the previous point. With multiple people having hosting rights, one of these can be a dedicated troubleshooter. He can police the people in the meeting, check attendance to ensure all the necessary parties are present and remove anyone who should not be in the meeting.

This host can also act as a timekeeper. He ensures that the whole meeting is on record or just those parts that need a permanent record, without the speaker forgetting to do everything, as they would with a single-host webinar.

Greater scrutiny

One of the hosts — or an admin with hosting access — can operate as a presentation manager. He can use the in-built analytics to see where participants’ eyes are moving. So, for example, if the speaker is running a slide presentation in the top left portion of the screen and everyone’s eyes are trained on that, all is well and good.

But suppose a participant has posted a meme or a gif in the chatbot. In that case, the presence manager can post a few neutral comments to move the gif out of sight. Or to shut down chat for the time being. And also, privately message any disruptive participants and ask them to behave more professionally or refrain from interruptions of this sort.

This analytical software can also be excellent for giving feedback to speakers. For example, it allows them to see which parts of their talk participants received well and where, if at all, the audience became bored or disengaged.

Currently, over seventy-five percent of employees use some video presentation software regularly. And it looks set to become a permanent way of working.

Another advantage is the possibility of a synchronous and asynchronous webinar, adding flexibility to an employee’s life.

The many advantages of a paid plan for webinar production can add so much value to the business. According to Forbes, they will quickly amortize the monthly cost for a webinar software. Also, they provide employees with flexible meeting options, any-time learning, and much more.