Digital marketing has evolved quickly. With more and more noise, marketers are having to rethink how to stand out and engage.
In this new digital era, webinars have led the way – they can shift the growth trajectory of your business. As per BrightTalk, In 2021 webinars (81%) are the preferred content format by professionals, followed by online courses and virtual events. But poor webinar promotion is the root cause of poor webinar attendance rates
One of the reasons behind this preference can be that 62% of professionals request a demo after viewing a relevant vendor webinar, while 80% of them say they’re likely to watch another webinar.
Webinars are among the most high-converting content formats, but if you are not aggressively promoting them, blame yourself if you hear crickets. If you don’t reach out to them, they will not come.
Here are some proven tactics of webinar promotion so that you can reach more people and grow your audience.
The duration to promote your webinar should be planned and strategically laid out for maximum registrations. Promoting too early might result in uninterested people attending and the opposite is true when you promote too late.
Here are some statistics from research done by GoToWebinar regarding how early you should start promoting your webinars:
Promoting at least four weeks before the live webinar results in 12% more registrations on average.
59% of registrations occur less than a week before a webinar, and 17% occur 24 hours before the webinar.
From these data points, we can conclude that the highest registration occurs within a week of the webinar. Besides, your webinar marketing should not end until the last minute of the webinar.
The webinar reminder email sent a few hours ago can also get you more signups and let the registrant know your webinar is going live.
Moreover, the timing is a tricky thing to get right, but testing and experimenting with different timings will help you find the best time and day to host your webinar.
How to promote your webinars organically
The first step to promoting your webinar is to create a landing page where people can sign up. Choosing a good webinar platform will give you the option of fully integrated ticketing and registration with plenty of customization.
Steal these 10 proven webinar promotional tactics without paying a dime
1. Talk About Your Webinar On Linkedin & Twitter
LinkedIn and Twitter are social media channels with significant potential for your audience. With so many people already active on these channels, you can run different campaigns, engage in group threads and forums and talk about your business on these networks.
Here are a few webinar promotion examples of brands using Twitter and LinkedIn
2. Post Webinar Announcement In Slack Communities
The rise of slack communities is becoming a major attraction to promote upcoming webinars. As people talk about their pain points and share relevant resources, slack communities are a different and non-traditional way to promote webinars.
When promoting webinars in slack communities, ensure your audience is in that community and hook them by addressing their pain points. A compelling design and copy will get you more signups than a generic Join our webinar post.
Check out this post by Karissa and how she leads with questions that her target audience will resonate with.
Email is, without any doubt, the best promotional channel as you get access to your audience directly and can create a personalized invite for them.
Often, promotional campaigns should include a series of webinar emails, and an example of such a series is as follows:
Email 1: (1 month before the event) → Webinar invites email
Email 2: (20 days before the event) →Reminder email for webinar registration
Email 3: (12 days before the event) → Follow-up with a recipient who has registered
Email 4: (A week before the event) → Reminder email a week before the webinar
Email 5: (few hours before the event) → Reminder email a few hours before the event
You can use emails in two different ways:
Option 1 – You can promote a one-time event by mentioning all the details in a webinar announcement, just like Superpath did in their email.
Option 2 – Talk about your upcoming webinars in your email newsletters such as Litmus did:
4. Cross-Promote With Your Partners And Influencers
You should reach out to your partners and ask them to promote your webinar in their newsletter or social media posts. Besides, ask them to tag, retweet, and share your promotional post on social media to generate more impressions and drive signups.
Influencer marketing is fast emerging as a B2B marketing trend. Influencers online are a powerful way of shaping the conversations that occur. This is something you should take advantage of when marketing your webinar – in particular, collaborating with influencers who work in the same industry as you can add credibility to your webinar.
This case study of Samsung is a great example of influencer marketing
5. Market Your Webinar Through Your Guest Speaker
If you are conducting a webinar with a guest speaker, it’s best to ask them to share the webinar with their network. It will make you an authoritative source in the guest speaker’s audience and help boost registration.
Here’s an example of a guest reposting the webinar promotion post from the person conducting the webinar.
Another webinar promotion example is this post by the guest speaker on LinkedIn about the webinar she will be a part of
6. Use Web Pop-Ups To Market Your Webinar
Pop-ups on your brand website are an interesting way to generate awareness about upcoming webinars and capture your website visitors. But, pop-ups have got a bad rep because many of the pop-ups are displayed at the wrong times, are shown too frequently, and don’t fit within the context.
To leverage pop-ups for webinar marketing, you should follow these practices:
Test different pop-up types – time-based, scroll-based, banner pop-ups, etc.
Avoid showing pop-ups as soon as the person lands on your page. Give them the time to absorb the information.
Use exit-intent pop-ups to capture the bounced visitors.
SEJ’s pop-ups for webinar promotion showed after a certain time I spent on their site. It caught my attention as I was already engaged and was looking for more information.
7. Make Your Employees Your Ambassadors
Your employees are the biggest advocate of your organization. Provide them with videos, images, and other collateral to promote company webinars on their social networks. The added bonus is that it also educates your employees about your product & services.
They can also reach individuals in their network whom they know well and to whom the topic might be relevant. This will create a more personalized webinar invite, leading to higher registration. The best thing about employee promotions is that it totally removes the need for expensive marketing efforts and diverts it to other channels.
Further studies show that webinar promotion through your employees not only can drive webinar registrations but also contribute a significant percentage of high-quality leads to the company.
8. Make Instagram & Youtube Shorts Of Previous Webinars
Your past webinars & virtual events are a gem for repurposing content, and one way to use them to your benefit is to create Instagram Reels and Youtube shorts. As video content is ruling the internet today, you can create promotional campaigns and spread the word around social media.
For example,
The first can be a webinar promo video, giving a sneak peek into the content and guest line. The aim is to build up curiosity.
The next video can reveal the secret and share all the details with a CTA to register.
The third video can talk about the reasons for joining and the number of people who have already registered. This will create FOMO and drive more registrations.
9. Use Testimonials From Previous Attendees
Social proof is one of the main driving factors in catching people’s attention and building trust and credibility. One way is to collect testimonials from attendees of previous webinars and use them to show the value your webinars offer.
To leverage testimonials, combine them with the picture to make it more human and engaging.
10. Participate Or Host Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to take your brand’s message to new expert audiences. They provide better recall than on-demand video and it’s never been easier to get started.
Talk about it in your podcast. Discuss the topic, guest list, and reason for joining.
Be a guest on other podcasts and promote it there.
Ask for sponsorship from well-known podcasts in your niche.
How To Promote Your Webinar Through Paid Media
Besides organic tactics, you can also use paid marketing for webinar promotion. Paid marketing is one of the quickest, easiest, and most effective ways to market your webinar. The advantage paid marketing is that your ads can be highly targeted so the results are quantifiable. Marketing through ads is popular because the results are often hard to deny. While there’s a risk of pushing marketing too hard, starting small or hiring an expert can make sure you’re able to get decent ROI.
Some of the most effective paid marketing channels for marketing your webinar are
1. Get Endorsement From Related Brands In Your Industry
Reach out to people in your niche and ask them to endorse your upcoming webinar. Most often, we have seen this endorsement in a newsletter, and an example of it is shown in the image below:
This tactic can generate higher registration as it builds credibility by getting endorsed by a big brand and lets you leverage its audience.
2. Influencer Marketing In Your Niche
One way that has seen the most success in promoting webinars is by finding creators and influencers with a huge audience. From there, their followers will be exposed to your webinar, which widens your brand reach.
Here is a short list of things to consider to find potential influencers, especially with webinar marketing
What is their popularity, followers, or post frequency on Linkedin or Twitter
Which other celebrity or thought leaders follow or endorse them
Has the influencer ever hosted a webinar or a speaker to a webinar
Does the influencer’s posts/videos/photos match your brand identity
Can the influencer give your referrals or reports from previous campaigns
Is the influencer open to barter? For example, you can send them your product for barter or discount
Set clear KPI to track
3. Run Paid PR Campaigns
Paid PR campaigns are one of the traditional ways to promote different events. Similarly, you can market webinars on guest posts on news sites, banner ads, or traditional marketing channels like radio.
PR agencies can help you with marketing campaigns. They’ll even work on your webinar series which is great if you want to show off your products or services to a wider audience. And they’ll definitely promote your webinar on their social media and blogs. As an added bonus, you’ll get more followers from their network as well!
4. Use Paid Ads For Webinar Social Media Marketing
You can run paid ads on channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Remember to use ads on only those channels where your audience is most likely to be active. There is no point in showing ads to a large number of people if they don’t fit the definition of your ideal audience.
Here’s a webinar ad example on LinkedIn by Iron Lady promoting their upcoming webinar.
5. Use Google Adwords For Webinar Advertising
Don’t miss out on the astronomical number of searches that take place on Google daily.
Organic google search engine optimization is a great marketing technique, but Google Adwords provides quicker results. With ads, you can get more people watching your webinars which are at the top when they’re searching online.
We recommend that you research keywords related to your industry or topic, and target them with high-quality ads for your webinar. This ensures that the right audience registers for your webinar.
Conclusion
So, you have the most preferred tactics with webinar promotion examples and all you need is to find the one that will work for you. You can use more than one tactic at a time and often it is the best choice because a single tactic won’t yield the desired result.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is webinar marketing?
Webinar marketing is all about promoting upcoming webinars by using different tactics and channels to get more and more registration.
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