Having a webinar marketing strategy is essential if you plan to grow your coaching business with Webinars. But you need to understand how to use webinars for marketing effectively.
Webinar marketing is a transformative approach in digital marketing, enabling businesses to connect globally and effectively engage their audience without the need to meet in person. Businesses can use webinar marketing to cost-effectively educate, engage, and convert new or potential clients.
In this article, we will go through various webinar promotion strategies to market your webinar and introduce you to the key elements of a webinar marketing campaign. You’ll learn how to maximise your webinar funnels and the mistakes to avoid.
What Is A Webinar?
A webinar is a multi-media event, where attendees have to attend via web or mobile device. The webinar is conducted by a moderator who leads the webinar while the webinar attendees listen to the discussion online.
Webopedia describes a webinar as a “Short for Web-based seminar, a webinar is a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the Web using video conferencing software.”
In today’s competitive climate a webinar can form an integral part of any business’s marketing plan. Anywhere from one to thousands of attendees can view or participate in a webinar. The key to success with a webinar marketing strategy is to provide a quality webinar content that people will want to participate in.
A Webinar’s key features include:
- Real-time connections – connecting individuals or multiple individuals in an online meeting or presentation from across the world in real-time.
- Opportunities for interaction – webinars provide easy interaction throughout the meeting or presentation – both presenters and participants have the ability to give, receive and discuss information in real-time.
- Convenience – webinars are convenient to both the presenter and attendees since they can be held at any time across different timezones from the comfort of their home, office or place of choosing.
- Encourage learning – webinars encouraging learning by giving opportunity to more people to learn more about a particular skill or topic just as you would normally attending a seminar, school or conference in person.
- Technological advancements – with improvements in technology and internet access, Webinars are becoming more popular because webinar software and technology is more accessible and over time is getting easier to use and more feature rich.
- Low cost solution – Webinars are a low-cost option compared to a holding a seminar where you would normally have to hire a room, organise accommodation, printouts, banners, etc. So if you have a tight marketing budget a webinar might be the perfect marketing tool for you.
- Low risk option – while there are still multiple reasons and cases where holding a in-person seminar would be more advantageous. Webinars are a low-risk option for people and businesses to connect.
Scale Your Coaching Business With More Webinar Registrations
As a coach, you face a few challenges when it comes to scaling your business. These problems are shared across the coaching industry, but the main ones include the following:
- You put a lot of effort doing 1:1 sales calls, which makes scaling up your business difficult.
- You struggle to attract new clients and feel forced to lower your prices to do so.
- Marketing and sales are time-consuming and may not interest you. Therefore, you rely on word of mouth too much.
- You hate doing sales
However, a good live webinar goes a long way to solving these problems and is a great way to scale your coaching business. Webinars allow you to stop exchanging time for money and enable you to work once and get paid for it multiple times.
This is because Webinars give you the ability to sell to many people at the same time… compared to say 1:1 phone calls, where you are selling to one person at a time.
On top of this, you can focus on what you’re good at as a coach – giving value.
By giving value and demonstrating your expertise in your Webinars, prospects will be interested in what else you have to offer.
Making Webinars Work For Coaches
Hosting webinars allows you to reach out to hundreds or thousands of people from all over the world all at once. When done properly, they also have an excellent conversion rate for acquiring new clients.
If you employ a good webinar marketing campaign, you can even sell high-ticket offers and services, which you’ll find challenging or even impossible with just a website.
Scheduling a 60-minute webinar, once a week or month, can be very lucrative if done right.
Check out our case study where our client got a 41X return on his ad spend and over 14,000 sign ups.
Why Your Webinar Strategy Matters
A well-constructed webinar marketing strategy targets the ideal audience and creates high attendance while encouraging attendees to take action. It will help you to attract leads, drive action, upsell, engage with audiences, and build your authority as an industry leader.
5 Steps For a Successful Webinar Promotion
Let’s delve into the 5 steps for marketing your webinar. Strap in, and prepare to learn how to formulate the best webinar promotion campaign for your coaching business.
1. Set Your Goals
The first thing you need to do is set goals aligned with your business objectives as a coach. But you need to be aware that there are two types of goals when it comes to marketing your webinar focus:
Business goals: What do you want to achieve with your webinar? Do you want to use it to attract new clients, reveal a new product or service, retain clients, increase sales, or support what you’re already doing?
One of our clients knows he can’t reach C-level executives directly, so he runs a weekly leadership and management Webinar, where several hundred lower level managers and executives attend.
His goal is to get these people to open doors for him in the higher echelons of the organisation.
Webinar goals: These goals are more performance related. For example, how many people do you want to sign up, attend the live event, watch replays or take the next step with you?
This all depends on your budget and your audience.
A client of ours has an investment webinar for the general public where he gets over 1,000 sign ups each week.
But he wants to launch a new Webinar for high net worth individuals.
In this instance, 20-30 sign ups for each Webinar will be very lucrative.
The goal you select will also determine how you craft your presentation. If your goal is to get more sales, you may need to be more aggressive in pitching your offer. Conversely, if your goal is to build brand and authority, you can focus on providing more value instead.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
There’s no point in pushing your webinar to a target audience that isn’t relevant to your business. For example, if you have 2,000 people watching your webinar, but none of them want or need your product or service, you’re wasting your time.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to create a customer persona or avatar on which to focus your marketing efforts. A customer persona helps you understand where your target audience is in terms of the buyer’s process, allowing you to know how to formulate your webinar content to reach your goals.
Part of understanding your target audience is determining which part of the world most of them are in. They may have unique requirements that are specific to their geographical location. Also, you need to take time zones into account so you don’t schedule your webinar for when most of your target audience is snoring in bed.
For example, recently we promoted a Webinar in a low income country, and despite the fact that we targeted the major cities, we still got a lot of low income earners who couldn’t afford the coach’s offer.
Our lesson learnt from this is that we had to narrow our geographic targeting for each city down to a 20 km radius from an 80 km radius.
3. Choose The Right Coaching Topic
Once you have identified your goals and audience, you need to decide on the perfect topic for your webinar content. Your upcoming webinar should help your audience solve a problem – show them you can make their lives easier.
The subject matter should always provide your audience with value while making your offer the logical solution. Your offer should be positioned to help them to solve their problem:
- Faster
- Simpler
- Or Better
For example we work with a sales coach who helps frustrated business owners to reduce their sales cycle (faster) by providing them with a simple to follow sales framework (simpler) that closes more deals (better).
Your solution doesn’t have to do all 3… even 1 is sufficient.
Your webinar topic must be laser targeted to your audience, so choose your topic wisely and use as much detail as possible. It may seem tricky to come up with a suitable webinar topic, but there are a few things you can do:
Firstly, if you have a sales team, speak to them. They should have a good grasp of trends and know clients’ current obstacles. It would be best if you also listened to your audience. You can do this by monitoring social media and forums or sending questionnaires to your mailing list.
You may also want to keep abreast of what people are reading about online. Learning about keyword research will help you discover hot topics within your industry, allowing you to choose the right subject for your webinar.
Finally, go specific with your topic, but don’t go too narrow. For example if you are a sales coach, instead of saying that you’ll help them solve all their sales problems… you might just focus on helping them solve their prospecting problem.
But if you are saying that you only help luxury car salespeople solve their prospecting problem, that could be too narrow of a topic.
4. Be Equipped For Hosting Your Upcoming Webinar
Decent Hardware
At the very least, you need a computer that you can communicate through. But to make your live webinar more professional, invest in a quality microphone, a high-resolution webcam, studio lighting, and/or a decent background. Try to dress as professionally as possible to suit your audience. It will go a long way to build trust with your audience and help create your status as an authority in your niche. (And make sure you wear pants so you don’t go viral for the wrong reasons – like so many during the pandemic lock down)Quality Webinar Software
Your goals and topic make a difference in determining what webinar software to choose, as they have different features. Here are some features you should look out for:- A high number or unlimited sign-ups
- The ability to embed forms
- Easy user experience for you and your audience members
- Ways your audience can engage with you, such as Q&A, surveys, and polls
- Ways to share your content, like slides, video, screen sharing, etc.
Branding
You need to ensure your branding is on point before marketing your webinar. Ensure your branding is consistent and professional throughout all the elements of your business. You do this by establishing a logo, a set of colours, fonts, and a distinct style for your business. These should be used on your sign-up page, webinar presentation, and the footer of your webinar page. You may even want to wear branded clothing (of your business) to further increase brand awareness. This goes for social media, too, as your theme needs to be instantly recognizable, whatever platform your audience is on. You also need to think about your corporate image when it comes to online ads. For example, when you create ad copy, ad images, video ad assets, and social media profiles, your branding should carry on throughout. It should reflect your brand voice and how you want to be represented to the world.Optimize Your Webinar Registration Page
Your sign-up page should give your audience a clear picture of what your webinar will cover and how they will benefit from attending.
It’s best to be concise, using bullet points, highlighting guest speakers, etc. Keep it short and sweet to help people sign-up without doubt; nobody wants to read too much when making a decision.
The late Steve Jobs is well known for his presentation skills – they launched the iPhone, Mac, iPod, iPad and built a trillion dollar empire. You’ll notice that he even has single word slides or slides with just an image.
Your sign-up page should also have a clear call to action. This would be a contact form or a registration button that makes it super easy for people to sign up for your webinar.
Email Sequence – pre and post-event
Your email campaigns should start with a confirmation email. It should then automatically send attendees reminder and marketing emails in the run-up to the webinar to keep them interested.
One of the key things to increase show up is to employ ‘indoctrination emails.’ These allow you to share stories, photos, case studies, and content that boost your credibility and generate excitement so that they are more likely to show up for your online seminar. This is something we do for all our clients.
Your email campaign should also include follow-up emails. These will include a recording of the online event, links to resources, and other marketing material. Follow-up emails are essential for reinforcing your message and increasing the likelihood of reaching your goals.
SMS sequences- pre and post-event
You may want to give the attendees the opportunity to receive text or WhatsApp messages. These can include reminders and follow-ups to your webinar. They also allow you to engage with the attendees, so you can help them at the decision-making stage.
Thank You Page
Your thank you page is an opportunity to provide attendees with all the necessary resources after your event. It also helps you to nicely round up your webinar, highlight future events, or provide exclusive offers. 5. Webinar Promotions
There are several ways you can boost the number of people signing up for your Webinar. Let’s take a closer look:
Leverage Your Email Marketing List
Your inhouse email list is a goldmine for attracting potential webinar attendees, as you can message previous and current customers and prospects, who you’ve already engaged with.
Collaborate With Partners
Consider partnering with another coach for your webinar. A third-party speaker will also add value for your audience, as they can bolster your message by sharing experiences, insights, and strategies. All these will give your webinar attendees different perspectives and social proof, giving them more reasons to buy your product or service.
The company or person you partner with will also bring their own audience and expertise, which will bolster your webinar marketing strategy. Cross-promotion is mutually beneficial for you and your partner in terms of improving your industry authority. And who knows, it may lead to bigger and better things in the future.
Use Social Media Channels And Ads To Attract Attention
Social media posts are incredibly powerful marketing tools for creating brand awareness and attracting people to your upcoming webinar. At Radical Marketing, we often use Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and even Tiktok to great effect. In fact we have used social media and ads to attract sign ups for events ranging from 50 to 15,000 people.
6. Common Webinar Mistakes People Make
We’ve covered a few things that your upcoming webinar should have. Still, it’s worth reinforcing this by highlighting common mistakes when marketing a webinar.
The Webinar Doesn't Add Value
Most people attending your webinar will accept the odd technical mistake or the fact you’re broadcasting at an inconvenient time for their time zone, but they won’t stand for lack of value.
This is why identifying goals, an audience, and choosing a webinar topic are essential. If your audience isn’t getting anything from your webinar that helps them in some aspect of their lives, they’ll log out, and your reputation may get damaged.
The Webinar Feels Like A Massive Sales Pitch
If you intend to conduct your webinar with a “hard-sell” attitude, your audience will lose interest and feel like they’ve been duped into signing up. It would be best if you used your webinar to raise brand awareness or highlight a new feature of your business with valuable content.
People attend webinars to learn something, not to be bombarded with a sales pitch.
It’s a good formula to help them solve a small problem that they are currently experiencing, then offer your solution that helps them get it done faster or easier.
For example, a business startup coach might show people several ways to raise money for their startup idea.
And then offer a crowdfunding course that they can purchase so they can go ahead and do it themselves.
Pro Tip: One way to ease the sales pressure on both you and your attendees is to take a minute to pivot.
After you share your value content and help them with their first small problem, simply ask them if it is ok for you to share about how your course/coaching can help them to get the next result – get their permission before you start your sales pitch.
Use a Webinar as Part of Your Overall Strategy
You shouldn’t solely rely on a webinar for your coaching business. Treat your webinar marketing strategy as just one element of your entire marketing strategy.
Doing this will allow you to determine where it fits in the customer’s buying process. You can even develop multiple webinars to suit the different stages. For example, you can create a webinar that warms up prospective clients or close the deal on potential clients at the decision stage.
A good coach will have other strategies – such as podcasts, product launches, social media, VSL funnels and many others to generate clients.
Too Many Goals In One Webinar
Don’t try to create a webinar strategy that attempts to achieve too many goals. As we’ve already mentioned, a webinar can help you to attract high quality leads, drive action, upsell, engage with audiences, and build your authority within your industry.
But it can’t do all these at once.
Look at your KPIs and choose one to focus on using a webinar. If you spread yourself too thin and try to appeal to an audience that’s too broad, your message will be diluted.
Focus on helping attendees solve one key problem, give them 3 practical steps to do it. From there, simply offer to help with whatever product or solution you have.
Not Following Up With Webinar Attendees
A common mistake made by webinar hosts is failing to follow up with attendees. You will notice that only a few people will be ready to pay for your product or services right after one webinar. Therefore, you must start your “nurturing sequence” as soon as you’ve finished broadcasting to encourage more sales.
You should follow your webinar with a recap, including a recording of the event, notes, and additional resources. You may even want to offer “exclusive promotions,” depending on the stage of the customer buying process you’re targeting.
Following up with your attendees will bring you a much more significant return on investment than if you just say goodbye at the end of your webinar.
Poor Webinar Funnel Design
To maximise the impact of your webinar marketing campaign, you need to understand how a webinar funnel works. This is a type of sales funnel marketers use to attract potential clients using several steps that lead them to be paying clients.
The purpose of a webinar funnel is to attract people to sign-up for your webinar. The webinar itself is used to collect people’s email addresses and phone numbers, turning them into leads. When you have their contact information, you can send them offers and add value, ultimately turning them into loyal paying customers.
7. Post Webinar Marketing
After the live event you can consider sending your prospects to:
- Encores
- Replays
- A video sales letter
- Summarised version of the Webinar
- Sign up for the next event (if they missed it)
If you want to get more sophisticated you can separate out your prospects based on their previous actions – whether or not they bought or attended your Webinar.
8. KPIs To Keep Track Of Once You Start Your Campaign
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are essential for goal setting and monitoring how well your webinar marketing campaign is going. This is where the gold is for tweaking your strategy and optimising your next webinar.
In this section, we’ll highlight the most important KPIs to monitor to keep tabs on your webinar marketing strategy.
Cost Per Lead
Cost per lead is the metric that illustrates how efficient your webinar marketing strategy is regarding generating new leads. You can find out how cost-effective your efforts for acquiring new customers are.
You can measure cost per lead by looking at data from Google Analytics, Google Adwords, or a CRM platform. All you need to do is divide your customer acquisition costs per month by leads gained per month. But if you use advanced analytics software, you can build an accurate picture from the insights it creates.
A word of warning!
In one instance we were getting leads at 1/20 of the price with new marketing channels… But in the end we had very low attendance rates and zero sales from these leads.
We immediately stopped using this channel to advertise!
So even though cost per lead is important and what most coaches focus on… it only gives you part of the picture.
Landing Page Conversion Rates
Your landing page is at the top of your webinar funnel, so monitoring how well it performs is crucial. The landing page conversion rate indicates the number of people who completed your call to action. You can set up a metric in Google Analytics that will tell you your landing page conversion rate.
Most landing page software will also give you a relatively accurate measure of your landing page conversion rates on the dashboard.
A high landing page conversion rate is a good indication that your webinar funnel is off to a good start. But if your rate is low, you need to address the quality of your landing page and review if you are targeting the right people.
Here’s a case study of how we increased sign up page conversions by 326%
Email Open And Click Rates
This metric, also known as CTOR, shows you the percentage of people who opened your email and clicked on an embedded link. It gives you a good idea of how relevant your email is to the people you sent it to.
If the CTOR is low, your content isn’t resonating with your target audience. If it is high, your email recipients find your content relevant to them.
Check your CTOR rates in your email sequence and improve the non-performing emails.
Attendance Rates
Webinar attendance rates indicate how many people sat through your webinar in correlation to how many signed up. To work out your attendance rate, divide the number of webinar attendees by the number of people who signed up, then multiply the answer by 100.
Most webinars get attendance rates of about 20%-30%. Still, the figure depends on the industry, how good your follow up sequence is, your topic, your audience and the webinar software you use.
We have clients that have show up rates above 45% while others hover around 20% – even with similar follow up sequences. This shows that there are many variables in attendance rates.
The key is to keep testing the variables you can control such as the Webinar topic, headlines, bullet points, colours, images, copy and follow up sequences.
Drop Off Rates
Your webinar drop-off rates (also known as webinar retention rates) show how many people joined your webinar but dropped out before the end.
These rates are a good indication of how good your webinar is. If people don’t get to the end of your webinar, there’s a good chance your content isn’t relevant, your live webinar is too long, your presentation skills are not up to scratch, or people are getting bored.
You need to ensure your drop-off rates are as low as possible, so your audience sits through the entire webinar. If you don’t, your return on investment will be much lower. Also, you’ll have fewer people signing up for future webinars.
You’ll have a lower drop-off rate if you ensure the following:
- Great content that adds value
- Get them to respond to your questions
- Engage with your audience with Q & A etc
- Create games and quizzes to incentivize people to continue to stay logged in
- Create networking opportunities among attendees
- Keep it fun
You may detect that you experience big drop-offs at certain points during your live webinar. If so, review your presentation to see what could be causing people to logout. This way, you can fine tune and tweak your presentation.
Webinar Purchases
The bottom line is how many people end up buying from you at the Webinar.
This is where you’ll need to figure out whether:
- Getting the right people to attend
- Which ads are actually generating the most buyers
- How your Webinar presentation performed compared to previous sessions (and what did you change)
- Is your offer getting people excited?
- Is the price point converting at a profitable rate?
There are a lot of factors to analyse once you complete your webinar. So that you can use that data to improve future Webinar events.
Final Thoughts On Webinar Marketing Strategy Success
Now you should have a good idea of how to use webinars for marketing and formulate a webinar marketing strategy. Webinars are effective ways to scale your coaching business, but you need everything in place to make them work.
The key things to take away from this article are that you must set goals, choose appropriate topics, be prepared, and understand webinar funnels to get best results. But don’t forget to look at your KPIs to troubleshoot and optimise your webinar marketing strategy.
Click here if you would like to find out more about how our Webinar Marketing Service works.
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