9 Reasons Goto Webinar Users Are Flocking to Goldcast Instead

Any true B2B marketer knows that creating, executing, and scaling an event marketing strategy is one of the hardest jobs out there. And if you’re stuck in a rut with an off-the-shelf event platform, there’s simply no way you can deliver a revenue-boosting brand experience to your attendees.

As a modern event marketer,you deserve better.

You deserve a robust digital event platform built specifically to meet your needs. One that offers your attendees an immersive brand experience while producing rich data insights that fuel your sales conversations and deliver real pipeline for the business.

While GoToWebinar works for many, it may not or may not work for you. And before you dive into any digital event platform, there are some things we do differently at Goldcast that might make you rethink your options.

Here’s what you should know before you make your choice.

• Superior ease of use for organizers
• Deliver an experience — not just an event
• Accelerate speed to lead

With so much to think about when hosting an event, any shortcuts an event marketer can get their hands on are crucial.

But those time-savers should never come at the expense of attendee experience.

Here are just a few of the attendee-friendly usability features Goldcast offers that other legacy event platforms simply haven’t caught up to yet.

These days, everyone with a Canva account considers themselves a content production pro. And while most armchair producers don’t know the half of what goes into real video production, it’s undoubtedly raised attendee expectations of what they expect to see when joining an event.

Whether you go with a pro or DIY it, producing attention-grabbing event content is time-consuming.

At Goldcast we’re firm believers that your attendees deserve a Netflix-like experience when engaging your event. From one session to the next, your events should be easy to watch and get lost in.

But we’re also big on making sure that hi-fi experience doesn’t need to involve hiring an expensive team of producers or spending weeks of your time learning video production software.

With Goldcast, event organizers get intuitive, easy-to-use video production tools that can be customized in a matter of minutes by anyone (with or without a design degree) to create an immersive experience for attendees.

Unlike out-of-the-box platforms, our best-in-class video production tools include:

• Live speech-to-text captions and subtitles for people with deafness or those who are hard of hearing.
• Live subtitled translations in over 200 languages (including sign language), making it easy to scale your events globally.
• Chat messages, polls, and Q&As that can be shared straight from your virtual stage to bring the audience deeper into the conversation.
• Easy event-wide information sharing with ticker messaging that scrolls across the bottom of the stage.
• Customizable overlays and lower-thirds to bring your brand’s identity to life in every session.

Making your life easier as an event marketer is one thing, but making life easier for those speaking at your event is even better.

At Goldcast, we’re all about avoiding the virtual event tech headaches. And that’s exactly what our backstage feature is designed for.

With a single magic link, your speakers can:

• Access the pre-event run-through where you can easily meet, greet, and guide speakers on how to use the platform.
• Dive right into their presentation slot with a single in-event click.
• Meet in a digital backstage area to swap notes and virtual high-fives.

With automatic, easy-to-access tech checks, you can rest easy knowing your speakers are locked, loaded, and ready to rock your event.🤘🏼

‘Add to calendar’ functions aren’t just expected — they’re also a proven way to ensure busy attendees remember you exist. 👋🏻

Which also makes them a crucial feature for increasing your attendance rate.

At Goldcast, we go beyond the baseline ‘add to calendar’ feature with a completely automated calendar hold.

In one click, your event will be placed straight onto your prospect’s calendar without any additional action required. As soon as they register — boom. A placeholder instantly appears on their calendar.

With this one feature alone, Goldcast users can achieve an average attendance increase of up to 15%. Because let’s face it, life is always easier when we don’t have to think.

In our survey of over 500 business attendees, 72% said it’s the technology that makes a virtual event excellent.

For B2B marketers specifically, that means the early webinar platforms of yesterday probably aren’t going to cut it. With features like hybrid, video, and gamification evolving at lightning speed, the future of events is only getting more competitive.

Unlike mass market products that didn’t need to evolve, Goldcast has kept a strong focus on attendee experience from day one — delivering everything you need to stay a step ahead of modern attendee expectations.

For your event to stand out, you have to bring the wow-factor. And to achieve that, you need to pull out all the stops — and we mean all the stops.

Forget the done-to-death ice-breakers or one-way chat features. If you’re really ready to raise the bar, Goldcast helps you go far beyond the table-stakes engagement features.

While legacy platforms give you just enough, Goldcast gives you all the features you need to wow your attendees.

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The basics:

• Session and direct chat options
• Polls
• Social media
• On-demand content hub

The upgrades:

• Scoreboards and gamification
• Virtual event games
• Swag and gifting

The game-changers:

• Text and video Q&A
• Rooms and booths
• Photobooths

The best digital event experience you can offer is always the one that comes closest to replicating the magic of meeting in person.

Video Q&A does exactly that. Event organizers can invite audience members ‘on stage’ to ask their questions live, respond “face-to-face,” and engage directly with attendees in real-time.

Wherever an attendee is tuning in from, they feel like they’re right there with their peers, speakers, and, most importantly — you!

Networking is a fan favorite when it comes to reasons attendees join events.

Our data has found that 73% of attendees name visiting exhibitor booths as something they miss about attending in-person events. But booths are one aspect of in-person events that is difficult to do well virtually.

Acting as a small scale zoom call within your large digital event, Goldcast Rooms offer a way for small groups to have deeper discussions, share their thoughts, debate their points, or even dive deep into a specific product use case.

They’re a great way to amp up the personalization of your event and provide attendees with meaningful networking opportunities they might not have stumbled upon while walking around an in-person trade show.

Alright, this is where we’re really going to toot our own horn. If there’s one thing Goldcast truly holds the gold standard for, it’s our ultra-customizable branding options.

Legacy webinar tools simply weren’t built with this level of customization in mind. ‍But beating boring with standout branding that captures your attendees’ attention will always play a crucial role in delivering world class events.

Because at Goldcast, our belief is that every moment spent at an event is a brand moment.

So don’t settle for the bare minimum. Choose a powerful digital event platform that lets you customize every touchpoint of the attendee experience, including your:

• Registration pages
• Logo
• Stage backgrounds
• Favicons
• Fonts
• Call to actions
• Virtual backgrounds
• Buffer videos
• Name cards
• Sponsor logos
• Chat banners
• Emails
• And more

If creating an immersive brand experience is what you’re after, Goldcast has you covered.

Making your life easy is great. Providing a five-star experience for attendees is even better. But unless you produce equally epic results, your event strategy is never going to take off.

For event marketers, pipeline is everything — you need to be able to measure your impact on it. To do that, you’ll need seamless event technology that works like a dream with the rest of your tech stack.

With simple activity triggers, you can customize your calls to action throughout your digital events and webinars and track every attendee interaction.

For example, CTAs within the event such as “Get a Demo” help instantly capture hand raises.

With Goldcast’s Slack and Salesforce integration, BDRs and AEs are notified in real-time when a key account registers and attends an event.

If a key decision-maker comes to an event and asks an important question, you can instantly pass this information to your sales team who can initiate a focused conversation with target accounts both during and after the event.

Don’t get us wrong, most low-grade technologies have some form of integration these days.

But if your platform provider has ever uttered the word “Zapier,” you know you’re in for a patchwork solution. With a task as crucial as event marketing, is that really going to cut it?

When it comes to moving the needle on revenue, the deeper your integrations with business critical martech tools like Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, and Salesforce — the better.

Seamless data flows are where the magic really happens, getting needle-moving insights to the teams that need it, when they need it.

No matter what your lead scoring strategy looks like, Goldcast gives marketers access to a further 16 key engagement data points that can feed directly into your existing tech stack:

1. Attendee summary
2. Average time spent
3. Resource click counts
4. Traffic in broadcast
5. Userwise time spent
6. Q&A
7. Resource click data
8. Userwise poll responses
9. Requested demos
10. Userwise time spent in booths
11. Booth videos viewtime
12. Userwise time spent in
13. Userwise time spent in discussion group
14. Chat messages
15. All user responses
16. Video recordings

Event marketers can then use this data to:

• Automatically assign an engagement score to each attendee to determine if it’s a marketing qualified lead (MQL).
• Use the individual data provided to craft personalized follow-ups that show prospects you care.

If more pipeline is the goal, platform integration isn’t the place to cut corners.

There was a time when a webinar was just a webinar. Brands could get by on a sit-back-and-watch approach to generating and capturing demand.

But those days are long gone.

And honestly, thank goodness. Because the value you’re deriving from those kinds of events is nothing compared to what you could be generating with engaging, exciting and experiential events today.

Goldcast users across the globe are creating bar-raising events at an average pace of roughly 10 events per month. And they’re doing it in half the time.

If you’re ready to deliver the kind of unmissable events attendees are actually excited to see in their inboxes, we’ve got you covered.