Webinar Promotion Ideas

Creating a great webinar is a fantastic first step, but the second step is even more important. Webinar promotion strategies give your content the oomph to reach an audience and provide the coveted ROI you need to make the process worth it.

If you’ve never created a webinar, we can demystify the process. When broken down to core basics, your webinar should be valuable content that your ideal audience will find actionable and useful. It’s quite literally an online seminar where you’re offering to further educate them, for a price or as a way to bring your target audience further into your sales funnel.

There are a few key pieces to this puzzle. You need:

• Valuable content. What you’re teaching should have merit.
• Professional execution. Your webinar should be a high quality. (Pssst. It’s not as expensive or scary as you might fear). A great webinar promotion strategy. If you build it, they’ll only come if they know about it. You have to pick the right places to get the word out.
• In addition to webinar promotion ideas, a webinar recording promotion strategy is also recommended to extend the shelf life of your content.

If you’re interested in webinar promotion services to help create the most successful webinar, this resource will show all of the different options available.

How to Get Webinar Attendees

Are you wondering how to get webinar attendees to register for your event?

You should be. After all, it’s not just about creating a great webinar. It’s about making sure your webinar reaches an audience and garners the attention you need.

Before attendees starting registering for your webinar, the process starts with a sound strategy and (ideally) a few months of preparation. Within your strategy, and the tactics required to execute the strategy, think about how to get more people on your webinar. To build a great attendance list, full of people who don’t just register but actually attend, you need clear goals.

In addition to stellar content and a lineup of speakers, how to increase webinar registration should be a top goal. Your registration list can fill up with current customers, already engaged potential customers, or new prospects depending on the type of webinar. The more specific your team can be with the topic and audience, the better. Not all topics will interest all audiences, which is okay. Broad or general topics are not always a good thing for this type of content.

How to Promote a Webinar Online

If you’re wondering how to best promote webinars, the answer will often be specific to your event. There are a number of channels that work well, depending on your business model.

Do you have an extensive email list? Perhaps you have a lot of active followers on your blog or social media accounts. These internal analytics will help guide you as you make a clear plan on how to promote a webinar online.

Some suggestions on how to promote a webinar online:

• Personalized email. Sending out email with opt ins for registration can often be the easiest and most effective way to build a registration list.
• Social media mentions. Knowing how to promote webinar on social media starts with a few simple steps. The more followers you have, the better!
• Email signature marketing. By managing your company’s email signature and controlling which call-to-action shows up in each employee email, every email sent by your team can become an opportunity to drive more registrations.
• Ads. Paid ads can be beneficial to grabbing the target audience who hasn’t yet found you.

The key to launching a successful webinar promotion is in the planning. Understand your business model and audience and you can more easily find the best channels to reach them.

Webinar Marketing

Webinar marketing is just as important as the planning process to create your content. The two should go hand-in-hand. Your webinar should be created with your ideal audience in mind. If you’re answering their questions and pain points, they’re more likely to find value in your webinar.

If you have a great webinar and you know your ideal audience, the next step is developing the right webinar campaign to reach them.

The best webinar campaigns often use a few different tactics and multiple channels to reach the widest audience. Keep in mind that you don’t just want a lot of attendees. You want the right attendees – ones who will find value and convert to sales or future sales.

Some campaigns that might work include webinar advertisement, social media promotion, email signature marketing, cross promotion with other industry leaders, and personalized email outreach. Your webinar announcement should include enough information to give prospective attendees an idea of what will be covered and a bit of excitement about what they will gain.

Webinar Marketing Plan

Your webinar marketing plan guides your progress throughout the journey. Think of your marketing plan the same way you would think of a business plan. It should lay out all the tasks, channels, and tactics you will use to reach more registrants.

You can’t succeed without a goal. That’s what your webinar marketing plan should provide. You’ll set a goal for number of registrants and what you want the end result to be. For instance, if your webinar is a give away event, you might be using it to build your mailing list or push your audience further down the sales funnel. Your goal might be a percentage in sales. If your webinar is a paid event, your goal may simply be a set amount of registrants.

Setting your goal is important so that you can gauge your success and improve the process as you go. Knowing your audience will help you to develop the best tactics and organize your efforts.

LinkedIn Webinar

If you’re considering how to promote a webinar on LinkedIn, there are numerous ways the platform can help you reach your audience with great ease. LinkedIn offers a fantastic reach for B2B webinars and events, so this channel is integral to master if you’re in that demographic.

To drive registrations with LinkedIn webinar promotion, you can use a number of tactics through the site and on your own registration pages.

Some possible tactics to use include:

• LinkedIn webinar ad. This will help you reach some of the LinkedIn members who aren’t currently connected with your profile.
• A great registration page. Your registration page should give the LinkedIn webinar audience a clear idea of content and why they should want to attend.
• LinkedIn lead generation. The site offers lead generation forms to make the process easier for your prospective attendees and great for your to garner information.
• LinkedIn groups. Promote LinkedIn marketing webinars across groups in your industry.
• Don’t forget to use your own LinkedIn updates!
• Personalize through direct messages. We don’t suggest you spam people, but it’s a nice touch to shoot a personalized message to anyone who’s already an interested party.

How to Do a Webinar

Interested in learning the nuts and bolts about how to do a webinar? If you’ve never created a webinar, it can look fairly difficult. The truth is that there are many options available today to create a professional webinar. First you need to know exactly what a webinar should include.

Webinars vary in length. Your audience will often appreciate shorter content, rather than very long webinars. Some topics, though, can’t be adequately covered in a short span of time. The traditional length is between 30 minutes and 1 hour. Some webinars run longer than that and you may want to include time for Q&A at the end for your panel and attendees.

There are platforms and software devoted to how to run a webinar in the best format for your business. Some are free services. Others are paid for services but include help to make sure that your slides and presentation work optimally when you launch.

It’s also a great idea to do a dry run before your webinar launches. You might call this a “Go Live Check” just to verify that there are no glitches, all the slides work in the right order, and the content is easily understandable.

Best Time for Webinars

There is literally nothing worse than sitting down for a lecture just to have the speaker drone on about something totally off topic for the first 20 minutes.

You don’t want to produce THAT webinar. First of all, your audience won’t stick around until the end. Second, they won’t be able to sift through for the valuable information, so they’ll walk away feeling like they wasted their time.

The best time for webinars varies by the subject and speaker. The general census is that a good webinar might run anywhere from thirty minutes to ninety minutes.

It’s less about the amount of time and more about the value and the speaker’s ability to connect with an audience. That speaker we mentioned in the beginning – he or she was unprepared. You can’t give a webinar without a set script. If you do, you run the risk of going off topic, forgetting important information, and losing your audience.

If you’re wondering how long should a webinar be, keep the time in the general range of thirty minutes to one hour. Once you’ve had a few successful webinars, you can poll your past audience for feedback to see if it ran too long or too short.

There are also statistics on the best time for webinars as far as when to launch them. Tuesdays and Wednesdays seem to be the best days to start promotion. The morning or early afternoon tend to see the best attendance.

Webinar Statistics

Are webinars worth it? Most definitely.Webinars can be an excellent promotional tool that gives back again and again. Some things you should know about running a successful webinar:

• Attendance rates are thirty-three percent. This means that about one third of those who register will actually attend. Don’t stop promoting because you’ve registered the goal number of people.
• Send email on Tuesday or Wednesday. Webinar emails get a better open and response rate on Tuesday and Wednesday than any other days of the week, and they perform better when they’re sent in the morning.
• Ninety-two percent of attendees want a live Q&A. If you weren’t going to include a Q&A, you should.

Those are just a few webinar statistics, but we can reach a number of conclusions that will increase your ROI. First, if only one third of your registrants attend, it’s a good idea to record the event so that the remaining two-thirds can still watch the webinar later. This gives you another chance to offer them that value packed information and lead them further down your funnel.

Paying attention to the statistics will tell you what to expect and what has and has not worked for other webinar marketers in the past.

Webinar Listing Sites

There are a lot of ways to market this type of marketing event. Webinar listing sites provide another area to get your link and event out to people you might not reach otherwise. There are several options, including EventBrite, Event Setter, and Webiners.

Those types of webinar promotion sites, however, won’t necessarily generate a lot of traffic. They also don’t help you target your ideal audience. Think of them more as a directory of webinars that visitors can browse through based on their interests.

If your hosting platform has a webinar blog, that might be an excellent place to have your name mentioned (we recommend the GoToWebinar blog). Other options include industry specific sites and associations, Facebook groups, LinkedIn Groups, and message boards devoted to your industry.

Using multiple tactics to promote your event will ensure that you reach the widest amount of people. If you use these promotions for your contact list and those within your industry, your registrants will be more apt to attend and enjoy the event.