Webinars

5 Webinar Trends to Look Out for in 2019

5 min read

Dec 14, 2018

With an increasing number of marketers (and businesses) making webinars a key tool in their marketing arsenal, 2018 has been an excellent year for webinars and webcasts.

Across the webinar industry, innovation has been ramping up, with webinar trends and ease-of-use being at the forefront for producers and presenters. WorkCast’s own team has been leading the charge for the webinar revolution by enhancing our platform and studio security updates to ensure that our platform is the most secure on the market.

Meanwhile, we have worked to improve the presenter studio design, usability for increased efficiency for users within the platform itself and advanced interaction for simulive events, because we knew that improving audience engagement was an essential metric for many marketers.

Webinar trends in 2019 will be no different, with event trends already sprouting up amongst leading webinar platforms. While there is never any certainty when it comes to making predictions, here are the top 5 trends we envision will take the webinar world by storm in 2019.

Organic Audience Generation

‘How do I get people to attend my webinar?’

This is a question we hear time and time again, as I’m sure other webinar providers do. That’s why, when looking to 2019, organic audience generation is going to be super important. To address this, webinar platforms like WorkCast are going to look to proven inbound marketing strategies and how these can be adapted to grow webinar audiences in-platform.

In inbound marketing - of which webinars are an important part - organic lead generation is a key component. In fact, businesses have entire teams dedicated to growth marketing and content marketing, all with the same goal - to increase organic leads. 2019 will see this ethos extend to webinar leads and attendees.

What does this mean? Essentially, webinar platforms like WorkCast will be looking to provide or adapt technology that will allow you to grow your audience using inbound methodology (organically).

There will be a lot more emphasis on social integration - allowing not only webinar hosts and presenters to leverage their social networks, but attendees too. You could see webinar platforms offer the ability to register for an event using LinkedIn, for example, with the additional functionality of allowing them to forward the webinar event on that same social network.

The thinking behind this type of innovation is to empower attendees to promote the event as effortlessly as possible. This could also mean looking toward social automation. It probably won’t be long before we see webinar platforms offering hosts the ability to create tools, such as a dashboard, with pre-approved automated social content that attendees can easily disseminate to their own networks.

How soon that becomes available is unclear, but this increased integration with social media to help webinar producers supercharge organic audience generation is a trend we will definitely see over the course of 2019.

Low Latency Streaming Improvements

The FIFA World Cup saw some controversy in the UK this year and it had nothing to do with Marks and Spencer waistcoats (or vests for our North American readers).

During the tournament, there were massive complaints from people streaming the games on the BBC iPlayer who were experiencing time lags of up to 30 seconds. So they were hearing their terrestrially-minded neighbors cheers of joy (or screams of agony) before seeing Harry Kane’s golden boot for themselves.

The issue they were having was with the stream’s latency, or the time between when a video is captured to when it’s broadcast on screen. This is actually a common issue in the webinar world. Almost all webinar platforms experience some sort of delay between a presenter and audience.

Why? Because it takes time, ensure that the webinar stream gets to your device properly and in the best quality. While this lag is pretty much standard across presenting platforms, it can be jarring to presenters and hosts, especially when it comes to audience interaction.

In 2019, webinar platforms will look to change all that. We are going to see more webinar providers investing in low latency streaming (bringing down the lag between live and audience). Not only will this make hosting/presenting webinars much more straightforward, it will also allow for new types of interactivity even on larger events.

That’s because, without a time delay you’ll be able to bring in a greater amount of audience engagement. And so, the ability for two-way communication will be better than it ever has been in the webinar and webcasting world.

Massive Scale Online Events

Can you reach 50,000 attendees per event with your current webinar provider? Honestly, there aren’t many out there that make that claim, but 2019 could see that all change.

Now, I know most webinars and webcasts are streamed on a much smaller scale (the majority of those hosted on the WorkCast platform see attendance rates of under 1000 people), but there is definitely a market for large-scale, premium virtual events and webinar platforms are catching on.

The coming year will see webinar platform providers investing in infrastructure, so that customers can truly scale their events. That 50,000 attendee mark is not at all unrealistic, and in fact, WorkCast now offers this premium functionality.

This means that webinar platforms will be able to compete with the live streaming giants, while still offering customers the flexibility and functionality of a premium webinar service.

Combined with improved streaming latency, 2019 could very well be the year of the super-webcast.

Branded Webinar Experiences

If there is anything I learned in 2018, it’s that most marketing teams feel they are vastly under-resourced - all while more and more importance is being placed on marketing and lead generation.

And this comes at a time when marketers are making webinars a key part of their strategies. So what’s a marketer to do when they want to provide an awesome webinar experience, but don’t necessarily have the resources to put into it?

Webinar platforms have taken notice of this and will be looking to address it in 2019. One way they’ll look to minimize the impact on marketers is to provide them with a greater number of bespoke, branded webinar experiences.

We all know that branding is essential, especially when it comes to webinars and webcasts. In providing marketers with a greater number of resources, webinar platforms can create good will among one of their top target audiences - marketers.

Improved Integrations with Marketing Platforms

In 2018, WorkCast partnered with HubSpot to create a fully integrated webinar experience. WorkCast for HubSpot allows HubSpot users to create entire webinar workflows in their HubSpot account, streaming webinars directly into the platform. It’s also a useful tool for agencies, allowing them to create and manage webinar campaigns for clients directly in HubSpot.

This type of seamless webinar integration is what customers will be looking for in 2019, and not just in HubSpot. Marketers and businesses use a variety of CRMs - SalesForce, Eloquoa, Marketo - and while there are some good integrations available, webinar platforms (including WorkCast) will be looking to take that one step further.

Over the course of the next year, webinar platforms will step up their integration efforts so they can fully utilize CRM infrastructure to create end-to-end webinar workflows directly in the CRM or marketing - saving marketers time and improving brand experience and webinar quality.

Obviously 2019 will see some considerable innovations in webinar and webcasting experiences, and there may even be some surprises. But what I do think will be at the centre of any webinar platform innovation is the desire to make hosting online events as simple and efficient as possible for businesses and marketers alike.