Webinars are a fantastic way to build your brand and sell products or services, but you need an audience first. We’ve put together 10 great tips for marketing your next webinar.
Did you know as many as 32% of B2B marketers believe webinars are crucial to their success? That’s a compelling statistic.
This begs the question; how can you leverage webinar marketing and maximize attendance? Luckily for you, we’re here to answer that for you. Let’s dive in!
10 Webinar Marketing Tips To Increase Your Webinar Attendance
1. Pick an Intriguing Topic
If your webinar topic is rubbish, no one’s going to come to your webinar. Period. Your webinar topic should have a focus, specific enough to provide actionable and valuable advice.
What gets your target market excited? When people are pumped to learn, they’re far more likely to attend and listen to what you have to say. Attendee engagement is crucial for people to stay all the way to the end to hear about your offerings, so you can generate new leads or convert for sales.
Try doing some keyword research to find out what your audience needs help with and what would be valuable content. Not only will this validate your topic, but it’ll also help rank your landing page on popular search engines.
Top Tip: Go through your blog and see which posts attract the most attention. If your audience asked a lot of questions on a particular topic, there’s a good chance people want more information on the subject.
2. Run a Contest
You could run a contest in the week before your webinar. Get registrants to tweet something with a relevant hashtag.
Make it obvious on your landing page you’re running a competition, and explain how registrants can enter.
Webinar Top Tip: Explain the winner will be announced during the webinar- this is an excellent way of encouraging people to attend.
3. Choose the Perfect Timing
NEVER host a webinar at the weekend. This is a surefire way of achieving a low webinar registration rate.
Instead, studies show Wednesdays and Thursdays are preferable. This isn’t surprising. Most people try to catch up on a Monday and finish things off on a Friday, making them too busy to attend a webinar.
What about timing?
The timing of your presentation will largely depend on your target market. You should consider the following variables:
- What time zone are they in?
- Do they work a conventional office job?
- When’s your audience most likely to be around?
You’ll need to split test days and times and monitor the attendance rate. This is the only way to see what works best for your target demographic.
4. Utilize Your Website
More specifically, we’re referring to using your homepage to promote your upcoming webinar. This is an excellent source of traffic and allows people to get to grips with your brand- win-win!
5. Craft a High-Converting Webinar Landing Page
Your webinar landing page should outline what attendees should expect from the webinar. Here are a few things to clarify:
Who
Highlight the presenters, use a headshot and a bio explaining why they’re an authority on the subject.
Top Tip: If you’re collaborating with someone, make sure they leverage their following. This is a straightforward and inexpensive way of boosting your attendance rate.
What
Explain the general topic and list specific ideas you’ll discuss. Use bullet points to make the text scannable.
Why
Why should people bother attending your webinar? Will your audience achieve something with the info you’ll give them? If so, highlight that on the landing page.
When
Make the date and time very clear. You could even insert a countdown clock to build suspense.
Where
How can attendees access the webinar? Usually, you’ll email them a link that allows them to join roughly half an hour before.
6. Thank Registrants
Once someone has completed your registration form and registered for your webinar, sending an automatic thank-you email is an excellent way of building rapport with your audience. People appreciate the acknowledgment.
Use this as an opportunity to confirm their registration and reiterate the details of the webinar.
Top Tip: Add a call to action at the bottom of the email. Instruct them to add the time and date of the webinar to their calendar.
7. Customize Your Email Signature
Have you considered adding the link to your webinar landing page in your email signature?
If you’re sending tons of emails every day or doing regular email marketing, this is an effective way of driving targeted traffic to your landing page without doing any work at all!
8. Send Reminder Emails That Add Value
With follow up emails, you can design a sequence of emails to be automatically sent to your attendees before and after your webinars. This email automation can be part of an effective webinar funnel and can help you save time and retain more leads.
Always send email reminders precisely a week before your webinar:
- Remind them of the date and time,
- Re-establish the value you provided when they initially registered for the webinar.
By value, we mean providing them with things like:
- Informative blog posts,
- A free ebook.
- A previous webinar training.
Just make sure that whatever you give them, it’s related to the topic of your upcoming webinars.
9. Send Final Reminders
It’s not uncommon for registrants to forget they even signed up for your webinar.
This makes last-minute reminders essential for boosting attendance rates. Send a follow up email one the day prior to your webinar and another an hour before kick-off.
10. Utilize Social Media
If you have a social media following, then you definitely need to utilize this platform.
On LinkedIn there are plenty of places you could post about your upcoming webinar:
- Your profile
- On your company page
- Groups relevant to the theme of your webinar
However, if you don’t have a social media audience yet, you can run paid marketing campaigns on both Facebook and Twitter. This is incredibly effective for promoting webinar attendance.|
Apart from our top 10 list above, here are several other additional tactics you might want to consider:
- Offer incentives and free bonuses
Incentives are a great way to boost attendance rates. You can give participants additional bonuses, discount coupons or even access to exclusive content if they attend your webinar. One of our clients have given out Grab vouchers, Apple phones and even cash (as sponsorship for their new business)
You can put links to download these incentives in the registration confirmation emails sent out to people who have signed up for the event, but a better way is to only give them out at the end of the event. This will encourage people to attend and stay until the end of the webinar.
- Send out emails with links to your event replay page
After the webinar is over, you can still get people who missed the event to watch the replay. Send out emails with links to your replay page and include calls-to-action directing people to watch it. You can also add in snippets of content from the webinar as this will encourage people to take a look at what they missed out on.
In our experience, this is a great way to retarget people (even those who attended but didn’t take up your paid offer) and get extra sales that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. This can add an additional 50% to your profit.
You can even create a teaser video for each session and post it on social media or YouTube. This is an excellent way of getting potential attendees interested in attending future events.
- Leverage influencers to promote your event
Influencer marketing for webinars is an excellent way of getting more eyeballs on your event and boosting attendance numbers.
Reach out to influencers who have an audience who might be interested in your content and ask them to promote it. You can promote each other’s events as a win-win deal.
When we did this with business partners who aren’t our competitors, it was a great way to offer extra value to our customers. We also shared the profit from any paid promotions that we ran to each other’s audience.
- Leverage User Generated Content
User generated content (UGC) is a great way to build trust and promote attendance for future events. Ask people who have attended your webinars to submit reviews or testimonials and share these on social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Instagram.
There are many testimonial management apps that you can use to easily get attendees to submit pictures and videos related to your event. This way you can also better store and manage all the testimonials in one place.
This will increase awareness of your webinar and generate a positive buzz that will attract more people to future events.
- Monitor Social Media and Online Communities
Social media and online communities are excellent places to monitor and engage with potential participants. Follow relevant conversations, answer questions, provide helpful resources and build relationships with your target audience.
By monitoring these channels, you’ll be able to identify topics that your audience are already interested in, and boost attendance rates for your webinars. You could even identify problems and create products/ services to solve those problems.
- Track Performance Metrics
Finally, it’s important to keep track of the performance metrics associated with each webinar marketing campaign. This will help you identify which strategies are working best so that you can focus your efforts accordingly.
Some key metrics to track include registration rate, attendance rate, average time spent watching a replay video and completion rate. By tracking these statistics over time, you’ll be able to adjust your strategy for future events and ensure success!
Were These Webinar Marketing Tips Handy?
If you found these webinar marketing tips useful, then you’ll love the other articles on our blog. Over there we discuss everything from Facebook advertising tips to branding advice. Enjoy!
Are you struggling to get webinar attendees? Find out how our digital marketing agency can help you knock your webinar marketing out of the park. You can find out more about our webinar promotion services and check out the case studies of amazing results we’ve delivered for multiple clients. Or simply get in touch with us to have a no-obligation chat by clicking the box below:
