Belal Atiyyah
So, you’ve decided to venture out of blog posts and explore new types marketing tools like webinars and podcasts?
Good thinking. Both webinars and podcasts offer countless benefits to brands, marketers, and content creators. However, both serve different purposes.
Like what?
While webinars are useful for live interactions, podcasts are great to reach on-the-move users.
Today, in this post, you will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of webinars and podcasts. Using these insights, you can find your best fit and risk-proof your investment.
Let’s get started…
Webinars: Pros and Cons
Let’s take a look at the benefits of webinars first:
- Webinars offer a multi-sensory experience by combining audio, visual, and text content. This helps keep the audience engaged for a full 45-60 minutes.
- Webinars draw high-potential audiences who are genuinely interested in your content. If your webinars are lively and valuable, you can hope to earn more conversions/sales.
- Webinars have real monetizing potential. If you host paid events, you can earn money even during the registration stage.
- Simulated webinars offer flexibility by letting you stream pre-recorded content. This way, you don’t have to create content from scratch for recurring events like employee training and product orientation.
- Webinars are more suitable for practical skills training. Webinar software usually provides a screen sharing option, so you can show work with various programs on your desktop instead of telling the listeners what they should do.
- Webinars give more personal connections. During the webinar, you interact with attendees: ask them questions, read their answers in chat, even invite them to a face-to-face conversation. Podcasts don’t have instant interaction with the audience.
However, webinars are not free from drawbacks. Here are some of them:
- Typically, webinars are live events. Attendees can’t fast-forward or join on-demand.
- Unless you have a content mill churning out unique webinar content at scale, it’s hard to maintain broadcast frequency.
- During webinars may arise different technical issues, lags, interruptions, delays. The quality of webinars depends on many factors: your and your attendees’ internet speed, the quality of webinar providers, etc. Podcasts don’t have such problems because this is a pre-recorded audio.
Podcasts: Pros and Cons
Now, we come to the advantages of hosting podcasts:
- Podcasts are wildly popular among commuters and busy multi-taskers. Since they are pre-recorded and require no registration, people on-the-go can tune in anytime, anywhere.
- Unlike webinars, where all your glitches are captured in real-time, podcasts are more forgiving. You can polish and fine-tune them post-recording.
- Podcasts are usually done in series. You get the opportunity to build a consistent audience. You can keep the audience hooked by creating buzz about upcoming episodes.
Take a look at the shortcomings of podcasts:
- Podcasts don’t attract as high-quality an audience as webinars.
- Since podcasts don’t offer visual stimulation, the audience can be easily distracted. Lower engagement level means lower impact, and consequently, fewer conversions.
- Podcasts are almost never monetized, although you can host sponsored events.
- With webinars, you can use presentations and videos to explain complex topics. But podcasts allow only audio content. Try as you might, you can’t convey information as impactfully in podcasts, especially if you plan to deliver demos and tutorials.
Webinars Vs. Podcasts: The Winner?
As you can see, both webinars and podcasts have limitations and plus points. There is no universal winner. Your choice will depend on many factors, including topic complexity and business goals.
For more information on this topic, check out this infographic first published by FLOW:
