Webinar marketing is a key component of your overall webinar strategy. Planning and organizing a webinar ensures the event runs smoothly, but marketing determines the quality of the leads you obtain. You invest significant time into hosting webinars, so you should earn the most promising leads from them.
Webinar promotion is vital to your event success
You could create a webinar registration page and hope people find it, but hope alone isn’t usually effective. If you want people to sign up for your event, you have to promote it.
Promoting your event through multiple channels can increase your event reach and strengthen brand awareness. It often takes several touchpoints before someone takes action, so advertising your event on various platforms will also nurture these leads and turn them into registrants.
Event promotion expands the number and quality of your registrants, which increases your webinar ROI. However, be sure to only promote your event to the right audience so you can customize the content as specifically as possible.
Webinar marketing: How to promote your webinar
1) Find the right promotion timeline
If you promote your webinar too early, people will forget about it. If you promote too late, schedules will already be full.
Luckily, GoToWebinar has crunched the numbers for you:
- 15% of registrations happen three to four weeks before the webinar.
- 69% of registrations happen the week before the webinar.
- 33% of registrations happen the day of the webinar.
- Tuesdays are the best day for registrations.
- Most registrations happen between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.
Start marketing your webinar four weeks before the event, and ramp up your efforts the week it occurs, all the way to the day of.
2) Build a registration page that converts
Your webinar sign-up page is an important marketing component as well. It’s the final step before someone decides to commit to your event (or blow it off). Create an enticing online registration page that features:
- A catchy title that’s informative and intriguing.
- Bullet points covering what people will learn from the webinar.
- The names and expertise of any guest speakers.
- The date, time, and length of the event.
You can further optimize your page to drive registrations by including testimonials (to add credibility), a countdown timer (to produce a sense of urgency), and references to the webinar being free, if it is (to remove any monetary barriers).
3) Share your webinar everywhere
The more places you mention your webinar, the more people will hear about it (and hopefully sign up). Promotional activities should cover:
- Website – Reference and link to your webinar in your blogs, guest blogs, and on your website. You can use pop-ups and banners to highlight the event as well.
- Emails – Promote the upcoming webinar in your email newsletter, and talk to your partners to see if they’re willing to share with their audiences.
- Social media – Hype up your webinar on your social pages, and pin the announcement to the top of your feeds. You can also create a hashtag on social media for big events, or for a webinar series.
- Advertising – For big events, you can use ads on social media or Google search ads to share your webinar across the web. If you use print or digital signage, consider adding the webinar announcement to these too.
- Mobile notifications – Use in-app push notifications or automated text messaging to alert existing audiences to your webinar. Note: You must have permission first before sending mobile notifications.
- Customer-facing teams – Brief sales and support teams about the webinar schedule so they can share relevant events with your customers. Consider having them add a CTA to their email signatures as well.
- Guest speaker network – If you invite another team to join a webinar, work with guest speakers and their brands to promote the event to their audiences.
- Registrants – In your confirmation email or post-registration thank you page, encourage registrants to share that they are attending on social media.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these channels.
Website
Your website is a direct path to your customers.
If you plan to host a virtual event, it’s crucial you promote it on your site.
The first thing I recommend is to create a specific page for events, along with a webinar landing page. If you followed my Webinar Strategy 101, you should already have a landing page set up.
These resource pages provide more information about your upcoming events, and collate all of your past events for visitors to browse. They can also benefit your organic visibility by increasing the likelihood of people finding your events through search engines such as Google.
You should also reference and link to your webinar registration page in your blogs. You can do this by adding a call-to-action button, form, or banner to your blog articles to encourage people to click through and sign up for the event.
Use pop-ups and banners to highlight the event as well. These are great for capturing the attention of website visitors as they browse your site, giving them a gentle nudge to sign up for your webinar.
You aren’t limited to your website either; keep an eye out for guest posting opportunities to promote your upcoming webinar.
Emails
When it comes to driving conversions, email marketing is a highly effective marketing channel. The average conversion rate for email marketing sits impressively at approximately 15%.
Your email audience has likely already bought into your brand, meaning they’re more likely to sign up for your events. Promote the upcoming webinar in your email newsletter and set up an email funnel for anyone who registers for your event.
You should also talk to your partners to see if they’re willing to share with their audiences. This will allow you to get your webinar in front of even more people. It’s an easy way to double your reach and, potentially, your webinar sign-ups.
How to create a newsletter that generates leads
Social media
Don’t forget to hype your webinar on your social media pages.
Promoting your webinar on social media requires more than one rushed announcement post, though. Plan to create a series of social media posts to announce and promote the virtual event. Aim to advertise the event on social media at least one month in advance. This will give you plenty of opportunity to promote it, build interest, and show why your followers should attend. You can also pin the announcement to the top of your social feeds to draw even more eyes to your upcoming event.
If you’re planning a big virtual event where you expect a lot of audience participation or interest, you should also craft a social media hashtag for your event or webinar series. When anyone posts about your event online, they can then add your hashtag, giving you access to user-generated content for social proof.
Advertising
Advertising is a powerful way to reach your ideal audience more quickly. With owned channels like your website, newsletter, and organic social media, your reach is limited to the people who are already aware of your brand.
Advertising widens your net by letting you set targeting options to reach your ideal audience at the right time, in the right place.
For large events, you can use ads on social media or Google Search ads to share your webinar across the web. This increases the visibility of your upcoming webinar and encourages even more people to sign up for it.
If you use print or digital signage, consider adding the webinar announcement to these too. You could also take out advertising space with relevant print magazines to promote to even more people.
Mobile notifications
Mobile notifications and automated text messages are often untapped marketing channels.
Use in-app push notifications or automated text messaging to alert existing audiences to your webinar. This is a great way to inform your existing customers or previous webinar attendees about an event that might interest them.
You can also set up automated text alerts to remind webinar registrants about the event so they don’t miss it. It’s a simple, yet effective way to boost webinar attendance and increase your registration-to-attendee conversion rates.
Tip: Make sure to follow the rules of engagement for mobile messaging like push notifications and text messages, to avoid being blacklisted from SMS platforms.
Customer-facing teams
Communication is key when planning upcoming webinars. You need to make sure all relevant departments and teams, especially customer-facing ones, are aware of your event schedule. By getting your colleagues involved in your webinar marketing plan, you can leverage their networks.
Ask your customer-facing teams and colleagues to reshare your event announcement posts on social media. Posts from individuals tend to perform better than company posts, so having your colleagues reshare your announcements can noticeably increase awareness for your upcoming event.
Be sure to brief sales and support teams about the webinar schedule so they can share relevant events with your customers. You can make this easier for them by providing template messaging to use when speaking to customers, or by setting referral and registration targets for them.
Make sure your customer-facing teams also add a webinar banner and registration page link to their email signatures.
Guest speaker network
If you invite another company to co-host a webinar, work with their team, guest speakers, and brands to promote the event to their audiences. Leveraging webinar partnerships maximizes the promotional reach of your upcoming webinars.
Webinar partnerships can amplify the credibility of your webinar as well. By leveraging the expertise of your guest speaker or their brand, your event can promise even deeper insights than it would have with a single presenter. You can tap into thought leaders, industry experts, and well-known brands to lend their credibility to your event.
Be sure to add webinar promotion into your partnership agreement. You can also make webinar promotion easier for everyone involved by creating a webinar promotion checklist. This way, everyone can ensure they’ve promoted the virtual event on all available channels.
Tip: I’ve created a promotion checklist you can use in my online event planning templates.
Webinar partnerships: How to leverage strategic partnerships to drive webinar success
Registrants
The people who sign up for your virtual event have already demonstrated interest. So, it’s likely the people in their network may also want to attend.
Use your event confirmation page or post-registration thank you page and emails to encourage registrants to share on social media that they’re attending. You could do this by asking them to share a link to your social media handles and your event hashtag.
You could gamify the process to increase participation by offering registrants an incentive for sharing the event online. For example, you could enter them into a prize raffle that will be announced during the webinar as a thank you for sharing your event on social media. Your rules of engagement could be to share the event graphic and tag at least three other people, or use a referral link and get at least one additional registrant.
4) Make it a regular series
If you intend to host regular events, consider turning them into an event series. This builds momentum for your upcoming webinars and helps maintain the attention of previous webinar attendees.
For example, you might have a monthly mastermind webinar that features a panel of marketing experts. This would be an event your audience can look forward to regularly, and keep an eye out for as they know to expect it.
You can use a hashtag for the series to increase user-generated promotion, as well as make it easier for people on social media to hear about your upcoming event and see what others think.
Hosting regular events expands your database of previous event attendees. You can then email these individuals to inform them of upcoming events you think they would be interested in attending.
5) Use consistent branding
Branding makes it easier for people to recognize your webinars. We recommend maintaining consistent branding within your event by using the same color schemes and style for your presentation and promotional assets.
Use consistent branding across webinars as well. This could include always using the same webinar promotional graphic template. Doing so will increase familiarity and make it easier for people to instantly spot a webinar from your company.
Consistent branding is also a bonus point for professionalism, and can give you a competitive edge over others in your industry.
6) Promote on-demand webinars
Webinar promotion doesn’t have to be reserved for live events. You can make them evergreen by turning your recordings into on-demand webinars.
On-demand webinars are great for people who might not be able to attend live events due to time restrictions, calendar conflicts, or being in a different time zone. You can increase your webinar views by recording your live events and uploading them as on-demand webinars to an online webinar library, either on your website or on a platform such as YouTube.
Additionally, you can use on-demand webinars to remind people to sign up for your mailing list or visit your website to find out about upcoming live virtual events.
7) Master your post-webinar communications
The end of the webinar isn’t the end of your marketing. A post-webinar email reinforces your message, directs people to your CTA, reengages those who didn’t attend, and gathers essential feedback.
Send an email after the event thanking people for their attendance. Provide a link to the recording, attach relevant information, and repeat your CTA in it. You can also include a link to any feedback surveys you create.
Tip: Take this opportunity to promote upcoming webinars. Tell them to bookmark your events page, or have them subscribe to an email newsletter that will announce future events.
Wrapping up — Webinar marketing strategies
Webinar marketing spans all the way from the planning stage to post-event. Be sure to incorporate the tips above to earn the most leads from your online events.
Don’t forget to create a webinar promotion checklist, or feel free to use my template to make sure you promote your webinar on all relevant channels.