Webinars offer one of the best ways for brands to showcase their subject matter expertise, create brand awareness, and build relationships with their target audiences. Just look at the stats. A whopping 85% of marketers who use webinars as part of their promotional strategy consider them as crucial for their marketing efforts.
But you can’t just run a webinar and hope people will attend. You still need to promote your webinar so people will know it exists in the first place. The more people who know about your webinar, the higher the chances for sign-ups.
With that in mind, here are five webinar promotion ideas that will help you get more webinar attendees.
1. Build A Powerful Landing Page
A webinar landing page is your primary means of communication with your webinar leads. It’s where they can provide important information such as their names, emails, work titles, etc., and sign up for your webinar.
But you won’t get them to sign up if your landing page is dull and less than compelling. You need a powerful landing page that will get them to take your desired action in the first place.
So, make sure you specify the benefits of attending your webinar on your landing page. If you can, include one benefit in your landing page title. Or, at the very least, use terms that will catch your leads’ attention.
Interested attendees will learn why attending your webinar should be a big deal. It’s where you get to share what the attendees will learn and from whom.
Essentially, your webinar landing page provides a great platform to build enthusiasm for your upcoming webinar. Check this out:
This particular landing page is simple yet compelling. It focuses on what the attendees will learn and from whom. Lewis Howes, a bestselling author, will give away this free masterclass to people looking for a profitable side hustle. There’s expertise and expectation from this one landing page alone.
For your webinar landing page to be effective, it should include:
- A catchy SEO-driven headline and a description of what the webinar will cover
- The webinar speakers
- Why is your webinar so important right now? What makes your webinar different from the other webinars that have preceded it?
- When will you host your webinar? You can also make the webinar available later through on-demand video platforms such as YouTube.
- A CTA – Clearly state your CTA, for example, “sign-up” or “register now.” Don’t forget to throw in the occasional cliffhanger, such as “only limited slots available.”
If you’re not a website developer or don’t have a hefty budget to hire a dev yourself, don’t fret. You can create your page with some of the best landing page builders. Landing page builders typically use drag-and-drop functions, making this process easy for virtually everyone. As for optimization, consider hiring reliable SEO services provider to help with SEO requirements for your webinar landing page.
You can also leverage tools like Attention Insights to see how users are likely to engage with your landing page before it goes live. This is a great way to fine-tune your landing page and ensure it captures as many webinar attendees as possible right off the bat.
You should also include testimonials from folks who have benefited from your expertise on your webinar landing page. These provide social proof for people who may be unfamiliar with your brand. You also want to drive as much traffic as possible to the webinar landing page from your blog posts, social media, email, and other channels. This brings us to the next point.
2. Set Up An Automated Email Campaign
According to GoTo, email drives a large chunk of webinar registrations. That makes email marketing a great webinar promotion medium.
With the help of email automation, you can send welcome emails, reminder emails, and even newsletters regarding the upcoming webinar. Here are some of the emails you could automate with your autoresponder:
- A webinar invitation or indoctrination email; This email can direct recipients to your landing page.
- A second welcome email. This can be sent to people who’ve completed the webinar registration process.
- Reminder emails; This is sent to remind attendees about the webinar. It can also be sent to people who haven’t registered yet, giving them another chance to sign up.
- A final reminder email with a headline like “Hey, only 10 minutes to go before our xxx webinar starts. Check out this FAQ before you start!”
An autoresponder will help you track your potential webinar participants. You’ll know who’s opening your emails and the recipients that go a step further to click the CTAs in those emails, including the registration link.
And thanks to generative AI, you can also generate these emails with tools like ChatGPT. This can boost your efficiency considerably. But, of course, you have to watch out for generative AI risks like hallucinations. Watch your prompts and analyze the output to ensure the information in your emails is accurate and matches the purpose of your webinar.
3. Ask Your Speakers To Promote The Webinar
Besides the expertise that your guest speakers bring to the table, they also have an existing audience. They can thus promote your webinar within their network to boost attendance rate even further. One way they can promote your webinar is through social media, as shown below.
With the networks and connections of your guest speakers, you are not just pitching to a lay audience. Instead, you have the potential to capture a broader niche market likely to be interested in your webinar series.
Your guest speakers can share the link to your webinar registration page via their virtual business cards. This will make it easier for them to promote the webinar whenever they share their digital business cards with others.
Additionally, you can create a joint email campaign about the webinar with your guest speakers. These emails can then be sent to both of your email lists.
4. Offer Incentives for Referrals
Diving deeper into social proof, we explore the idea of using referrals to promote a webinar. Social proof works wonders since referral leads have a 30% higher conversion rate than prospects from other channels.
You can offer different incentives for anyone who brings in a referral. For example, you can use a free ebook, a product discount, or a gift card.
In the image above, Conserv promotes a free webinar and offers a chance to win a $250 gift card to participants who refer their friends. You can also encourage subscribers on your socials to sign up and bring a friend to access exclusive content.
5. Promote On Social Media
The last of our webinar promotion ideas is social media promotion. Social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn provide powerful inbuilt tools that can help promote your webinar. You could even host a live webinar on these platforms if you wanted.
One way to use social media is through organic posts. You and your speakers could post short videos about the upcoming webinar or related subject matter on Facebook Live or LinkedIn Live.
With short-form and instant video content such as Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, you don’t need to worry too much about creating high-budget video promos.
Here are a few other tips for advertising your webinar on social media:
- Use high-quality visuals to promote your webinar and keep your audience engaged.
- Pick unique hashtags for your webinar campaign and promote the same hashtags across your social media platforms.
- Leverage Facebook business groups to promote your webinar since these are the best places to find a niche audience.
- Promote a registration link to your webinar landing page through social media posts.
- Schedule an online meet-and-greet between your guest speakers and your audience before the webinar. This could be done through something like Facebook Live or even Twitter Spaces. You can also use this as an opportunity to take in questions related to your topic that will be answered during the webinar.
Finally, you can use paid ads and banners on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social platforms.
The best part about this is that you can refine the targeting options to ensure your webinar ads are shown to the most qualified audience. For example, you can leverage LinkedIn if you’re targeting key decision-makers of enterprise SaaS and B2B companies. Similarly, you can target consumers with specific interests and preferences through Facebook ads.
In Closing
There’s no doubt that webinars are a great marketing opportunity to educate your target audience, showcase your expertise, and improve your brand visibility. However, they’ll only work for you if promoted correctly.
Techniques such as building powerful landing pages, leveraging social media and social proof, email automation, and referrals will give your webinar more visibility. Webinar promotion should also be integrated into your overall marketing objectives and SEO content strategy. For example, you’ll want powerful headlines and CTAs to boost the visibility of your webinar landing page on search engines.
With these five webinar promotion ideas, you’ll be able to get more sign-ups for your virtual event. Success awaits you!
