Webinars are still going strong as a marketing tactic in 2019. They’re a great way to build an audience, highlight your areas of expertise, deliver crucial training and promote your business. For many companies, they’ve become an integral part of the marketing funnel.
Here are a few trends that we predict will make their mark on the industry in the coming year.
Inbound marketing to attract an audience. Attracting an audience is often a big challenge for new webinar creators. We predict that new creators will become more savvy about this in 2019, utilizing inbound marketing techniques that include email, content marketing, social media and more to generate buzz around their webinars.
Increased interactivity. There’s no question that the best webinars are an interactive experience. Webinar creators know they’re competing for their audience’s attention with the whole of the internet, and many are getting creative at keeping their attention. We predict an increase in this trend—with webinars that encourage audience participation through in-webinar quizzes and Q&As, critiques of attendee work, custom hashtags on social, and more.
Better production value. You don’t need to have a lot of very expensive equipment or technical know-how to produce a great-looking webinar these days. You can produce a very professional product with affordable microphones and the camera on your computer—without spending a ton of money. As these tools improve, we predict a higher production value in webinars overall.
Webinars as an internal training tool. Large companies have been catching on for some time to the fact that large, geographically diverse employee bases can be trained both effectively and efficiently using online training—and for less money, too. We predict that as online learning grows in acceptability, even more conservative industries will start implementing webinars to train large groups of employees around the world.
Webinars as part of a larger marketing funnel. Marketers know that webinars are an extremely effective piece of top-of-funnel content, and a great way to generate lists of highly motivated and engaged prospects. We predict that we’ll continue to see marketers incorporating webinars into larger marketing efforts across multiple platforms.
In 2018, 87% of marketers surveyed claimed webinars were an effective strategy—and we don’t predict they’ll be going away anytime soon. Most of all, we predict webinars will continue to be a preferred method of connecting with audiences well into 2019 and beyond.
