BrightTALK Central is a B2B marketing platform to create content, engage an audience, and reach new prospects to deliver revenue growth. BrightTALK is a subsidiary of TechTarget.
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WebinarJam
Score 8.7 out of 10
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WebinarJam is designed to allow users to host online events with HD streaming, interactive features like polls and chat, integrations, analytics, and payment processing that are intended to help maximize online growth.
BrightTalk is well suited for those who cannot always attend live webinars, and can browse through many uploaded webinars. It integrates well with other organizations and provides an ease for what your organization might want to promote. I believe BrightTalk would be best suited for companies with a large employee base.
We have used WebinarJam for many reasons. Our main reason is to host large free webinars but we have also used it for smaller live training courses that people paid for, we have held private training classes for companies, and so on. I guess you could get creative and use it for a conference-style virtual event but wouldn't really recommend it for that. You could use it for internal training within an organization and things but I still feel it best suited for webinars and marketing purposes.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTHS: Easy to use the dashboard to start a webinar on demand, or schedule one in the future. Each step has a video tutorial made to set you up for success, understanding each set-up step along the way. If I want to practice a session live, I can set up a webinar instantly (called Right Now-takes 6 clicks and 30 seconds to set this up), and stream it through my YouTube Channel, or schedule a full campaign for a later date (takes about 10 minutes) and drive people to attend. I can set up one date, or multiple dates. It's very easy to follow the nine initial steps to (configuration, schedule, registration, notifications, integration, thank you, live, replay and finish) setting up your webinar. Once you have created a campaign, you can always clone them for future use.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: You can inject a pre-recorded video seamlessly. Let's say you did an incredible sales pitch on one of your webinars, you can inject this into future webinars to ensure a perfect presentation.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: Poll your customers BEFORE the webinar, on the registration page to find out what they are looking for, why they have signed up, to be sure the presenter covers each participant's needs.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: Autoresponder reminders can come from Webinar Jam (this is what I have always done to keep it simple) or integrate it with the top systems (AWeber, Active Campaign, Infusionsoft, IContact, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Drip, Kartra, Zapier).
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: I can set up a replay for those who missed the event, or even a replica replay where I can go into the video, fix up my sales presentation, and add a new video for people to see. I can also see who watches the replay.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: In the analytics page I can see the numbers of people who visited the webinar registration page (to get an idea of how popular my topic was/change headings or topics if it's low, keep presenting if there's a high number), registrants, people in the room when I go live, and numbers for those who watched the replays. I can connect my autoresponder to communicate with people who missed the webinar/replay vs those who attended and even can see when people dropped off so I know if they were engaged for the entire webinar.
One of the biggest problems we have is that WebinarJam was sold to us as a lifetime license, and it was supposed to include broadcasting on Facebook. For reasons that were never clear, they stopped providing that functionality, which greatly reduced our use for the product.
WebinarJam started out life as an innovative product, full of promise. Things changed within the organization, key staff and players changed, and it seems that key players just moved on to other projects. Users were required to pay for upgrades in order to get the best use out of the product.
A big problem that was never really solved was the Lag/Delay between realtime and what the users were seeing and hearing.
We really wanted to be able to administer Surveys to people during webinars and be able to store their responses and export them to a database. We were told there was no way to do that.
BrightTalk has an excellent usability and is intuitive with its design. The registration of events is secure, and the connectivity to webinars is seamless
The platform is really hard to use and they have a habit of pushing out updates without telling their users first. The last update completely reverted all of our customizations back to the default EverWebinar layout. I only found out about this after a lead kindly send an email to the firm letting us know that [our] registration confirmation page was showing lorem ipsum script. Customization is lacking as well
The support overall is good. In the early days, it wasn't the best but they have definitely stepped it up lately. If you have questions about the platform, issues, setup, etc, and don't mind waiting 24 hours to get a response then it's good. They may have faster response times now but when they updated to 4.0 it took a while as they were getting hammered with emails cause there were issues. It seems like they have worked out some of the kinks so I imagine their support can respond much faster now. There is no phone number to call so there is no way to get immediate help or answers which can be frustrating when you have issues right before or during your webinar
GoToMeeting is less expensive but does not provide access to a database of users or a good platform to showcase recorded webinars in a channel. BrightTalk is created more as a marketing and content hub so is better for marketing activities.
I prefer WebinarJam due to its super-easy setup and great integration options. It works well with other tools like ClickFunnels, Hubspot and Mailchimp. From the tools we tried, this one seems to work the best for our company and clients!
WebinarJam has allowed us to present to multiple audiences at our prospective customers, rather than just a few individuals which made it difficult to get to the next sales step. By engaging a larger audience, we were able to drive more attention to our product and made follow up with the customer much easier.
