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The Zoom boom of 2020 was catalyzed by the world shutting down. Everybody and their mother flocked to the video conferencing tool to fill the void of lost interpersonal connections.
As businesses navigated new social distancing rules, Zoom also became the go-to video platform for creating a virtual work environment and emulating in-person events. We love Zoom for what it is: an awesome tool for 1:1 video conferencing.
But the heart of any great virtual event or meeting platform is the ability to foster human connection. Connecting with other people is a genuine human need. Unfortunately, running large events and big meetings on Zoom makes building authentic connections more difficult. Audiences need interactive, immersive environments and experiences to feel engaged and transform from passive audience members into active participants.
That’s not to say there isn't a time and place for casual meetings with your team. But when it comes to a major event or presentation, production value and performance makes all the difference.
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into the comparisons between Zoom Webinar and Welcome, so you can get a better idea of which video platform is best suited for your virtual events or company meetings.
Zoom Webinar is different from its Zoom Meeting counterpart. Zoom Meeting is ideal for hosting smaller groups with lots of face-to-face interaction. Zoom Webinar is better suited for large audiences with one or a few people presenting to a listening audience.
Welcome fuses these two concepts together. Similar to a virtual auditorium or event stage, our platform features a main stage area that hosts large audiences and allows attendees to interact with the content, speakers, and each other.
Compared to Zoom's rudimentary engagement features like standard Q&A, chat, and polling, we've designed ours to be as immersive as possible. For instance, Welcome’s polls are embedded in the run-of-show. Instead of voting in a disruptive pop-up window, your audience votes on the main stage of your event in real-time.
Along with public and private chat with emojis and gifs, Welcome also takes a different approach to Q&A. We offer a more personal experience that closely emulates an in-person question and answer exchange. Attendees are brought on-stage live to ask speakers their questions. Audience questions can also be upvoted, so speakers address the most burning questions first.
When you want your audience to engage on a more personal level, use one-to-one video calling or set up separate breakout rooms and lounges for smaller group discussions. These features intentionally foster deeper conversations. Add another layer of fun to your event by encouraging attendees to snap a group photo in a branded photo booth. Now they’ll have a nice souvenir from the event to share on social media!
Both Zoom and Welcome offer post-event analytics, so you can get a sense of who joined your event or meeting. But only Welcome's dashboard offers advanced analytics with key engagement metrics at a glance.
You’ll also receive a 1-page Event Report Card with detailed insights into your event and session performance. These insights include:
Determine whether your attendees stay throughout the event and pinpoint when they start to drop off. This will give you an idea of when and where you should introduce new ways to engage your audience the next time around.
When you attend events in person, you expect a certain level of production value. Virtual events are no different.
Welcome offers a white-label experience for your event that drives home your brand identity. An epic hype video amps up your crowd, while visual overlays for presenter content allows your audience to interact with the presentation in real-time. These capabilities kick your production value up a notch, from ok to stellar.
Because it’s designed for simple presentations, Zoom Webinar is not optimized to deliver high-production value. It does compress audio and video to make it easier to stream. But if you’re planning to share high-quality music or mix a high-quality, pre-recorded video into your feed, Zoom has its limitations.
Welcome is essentially a built-in video production tool – it's like having a production studio at your fingertips. It allows you to do all of the things we mentioned above and more, giving your attendees an interactive experience rather than just another presentation (but, hey, we can do more traditional webinars, too!)
And it doesn’t take an entire team to pull off a high-quality event. One person can run the entire event from Welcome’s Control Room. Prep your speakers backstage in the Green Room, invite attendees on stage, and create branded overlays, titles, and lower thirds directly in the platform using Stage Kit. You can design your event like a pro, without having to be one.
When it comes to branding, virtual event design looks different from the on-site designs we’re used to. But, visual components are still important for virtual branding. Customize your event using your brand colors, custom imagery, backdrops, and logos.
Branding your event transforms it from a bland virtual experience into a custom virtual experience defined by your company’s ethos. While Zoom Webinar offers the ability to add branded banners and logos to your registration form, the event itself lacks most of these branding capabilities.
Whether you want to host a large marketing event, a sleekly designed webinar, or an engaging and immersive company meeting, the ingredients for hosting a successful event are all the same.
Unless your attendees crave a casual, unstructured meeting or a passive presentation, choose a virtual event platform that:
To see how Welcome and Zoom Webinar stack up feature by feature, check out the matrix below.
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