Here are 6 ideas on how to promote your webinar. In this post, we will go through these in more detail.
- Promote on your website
- Promote on your owned channels
- Team up with influencers and industry leaders
- Use video specific platforms
- Trust your sales team
- Invest in paid media
Creating a webinar, or a webinar series, takes a lot of resources from your marketing team. When creating such high effort, high impact content you want to make sure that people will register, view, and react to your content. That is the basis of content marketing ROI.
When planning your webinar, it is essential to narrow down your subject matter to deliver relevant content to the audience you are trying to reach. When you do this properly, it will be easier for you to determine how to best promote your webinar.
Each webinar you promote will sometimes have a different promotional plan – these may be different depending on the audience you want to reach. A general webinar about home loans in rural New South Wales will not have the same audience than a specific webinar about vaccination of children by a doctor’s association.
Understanding this is important as it will determine your promotional channels. When it comes to webinars, the channels you have access to are endless. Think social media, email, websites, guest posts in blogs, ads, YouTube videos and a lot more.
Want to get your webinar program off the ground?
The goal of this article is to list a few of these channels and how you could promote your webinar thanks to those.
1. Think about your own website
Your corporate website and/or your blog can be just the right channel to reach your target audience directly. Of course, this is appropriate to websites that already have an important visitor base.
Starting at 100 visitors a day, your website could be the perfect lead magnet for your webinars. When you plan the production of your webinar, do not forget to think about how you will integrate it to your website with an optimised registration page.
The registrations pages that usually perform the best are pages that are to the point, visually appealing and that limit the information given to the essential: information about what you’re going to talk about and what they can learn, the date and time of the webinar, the speakers who will be participating and a registration form.
Your site is also the best place to add some goodies to increase the visibility of your webinar landing page. One method we are using is a coloured welcome bar on our homepage that is visually different from our theme to get the attention of potential visitors. Add an appealing call-to-action to get your visitors to land on your promoted piece of content.
Another method you can use to increase traffic to your registration page is the exit-intent popup. This method can be intrusive, but when nicely done it, can lead to increased registrations.
If you already have too many pages on your website and your CMS is easy to use, it is best to use these pages to link to your webinar landing page. Think about adding an appropriate CTA to the most visited pages on your website.
If you have a blog section on your website, consider writing an article about your webinar to promote it. While this will take time, it can be a great way to attract new audiences to your webinar, especially if you optimise your content with SEO in mind.
Your site can also be used to add a specific Lead Magnet to collect contacts in exchange for a snappy piece of content linked to your webinar. People always like to get something for free from a website visit.
2. Think about your owned channels
As a business, your own channels which allow you to speak directly to your audience. These included your email database, social media accounts, PR statements, and others.
Emails are a huge lead magnet, especially if you reach the right audience, with the right message at the right time. Do not hesitate to dedicate some time to go through your email database to see if you have prospects that could be interested by your webinar subject matter. Always make sure your webinar invitations are to the point, have clear Call to Actions (CTA) and convey key learning outcomes.
It’s recommended to add one CTA to maximise your click through rate on the email. A tip that also helps in reaching more people is to have a clear email workflow with a clear timeline in mind. The timeline is totally up to you, but we recommend starting 2 weeks before, with a last chance to register 1 week before, reminders either 1 day or 4 hours prior, and finally, a thank you email containing the recording after the event.
Social media is also highly effective when it comes to attracting new registrations, especially when the subject you are dealing with is trending or relevant for your community. On social media, you will have 3 ways to reach out to the community: your own social media page, dedicated groups or via paid social media posts.
The reach you have on your own social media channels will depend on the channel itself (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and more) but also on your followers. The engagement of your community will also be important since this will determine how much people share your content.
Posting on dedicated groups will be effective on channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn. If your content is relevant to your group, then post away and consider starting a discussion.
Finally, social media can be used to find your target audience thanks to highly targeted ads especially on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. While you will need to invest more budget into this method – it does work and can be tracked.
3. Team up with influencers and industry experts
When promoting your event, you want to come across as an expert and thought leader; it will help you break through the clutter of webinar invitations and increase registrations. It’s difficult to walk away from a webinar that shapes the industry or topic you are interested in.
Make it more difficult for people to not register for your webinar by partnering with influencers and industry experts on your topic. By doing this, you can also leverage the database of your partner to increase your reach. Always make sure the partnership is a win-win situation and that you are both getting what you desire.
4. Use video specific platforms
Webinars can be either video based or audio, with supporting presentation slides. If video is an important element of your webinar, consider using video specific channels like YouTube, Vimeo, and others to promote your own video content. YouTube is especially important for video content providers since this is the biggest video channel worldwide.
Your video content can reach new audiences thanks to the SEO potential of YouTube content. YouTube is the perfect channel to recycle your older webinars and make it easier for audiences to reach you.
5. Trust your sales team
Marketing and sales must work closely in order for your lead generation webinars to be effective. Your sales team is in constant contact with your target audience and they know best how to promote your products and services.
If created properly, your webinar can be seen as an extra service you give to your prospects and this can give you an edge in the sales process. Trust your sales team to promote your webinar in a human way.
For this to work, you need to make sure that all relevant information (webinar landing page, images, template email) is provided to your sales team to maximise the conversion rate. Consider also using email signatures to promote your webinars – it’s free real estate!
6. Invest in paid media
If you have the budget, paid media can be a great way to reach more people. Targeted display and social ads can work best for these types of campaigns.
Retargeting ads can also be used to reach audiences that already visited your site but did not convert. Investing in paid media is a good way to optimise your webinar campaign.
If you want to know more about webinars, we can also give you tips on how to record a webinar or on how to create a webinar registration page.
Create great webinars thanks to our team of experts. If you need any help, please reach out on 1800 733 416. Webinars.com.au is an Australian hosted company that manages around 200 managed webinars per month for all types of companies.