Putting on a webinar is an excellent way to engage your audience, especially if you’re marketing for a B2B brand. Even before the pandemic normalized digital experiences, 73 percent of marketers and sales leaders cited webinars as one of the most reliable ways to generate quality leads. With advanced platform features, you can craft a virtual experience that positions your brand as an industry thought leader while at the same time forging a stronger relationship with your audience.
However, if you don’t get your webinar content in front of the right eyes, it won’t deliver value. That’s why promotion is just as important as the actual content. Here are seven ways you can promote your webinar.
1. Be Strategic with Your Emails
Email is the best channel for promoting webinars. A survey conducted by BeaconLive found that 65 percent of entrepreneurs viewed email as the most effective promotional tool for webinars.
So, what can you do to encourage your audience to open your emails?
- Make it clear in the subject line what your email is about by using the word “webinar,” “online event,” or “virtual event.”
- Share any enticing language unique to your webinar. For example, if it’s free, invite-only, or includes an expert panel, include this information in the opening of your email content or the subject line.
- Focus on what’s in it for them. Unlike other forms of content marketing, such as blog posts and videos, webinars require a time commitment. So, let your potential participants know what they will gain from attending, whether it’s expert insights, current industry updates, deep learning, or something else.
2. Coordinate Your Email and Social Media Messaging and Other Content
Email is powerful for webinar promotion, but to drive participation, take an omnichannel approach. Coordinate your email messages with social media posts and other online content.
For example, send an email message talking about your expert panel. Then, publish a series of social posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram (or all three), each one focusing on an individual expert. In the social post, link to more information about them, either on your brand’s blog or on a digital asset owned by the expert.
Also, consider posting guest posts on partner blogs or high-authority sites in your niche to drive interest in what your webinar is about.
3. Attract Registrants with a Convenient Webinar Time
To boost participation, your webinar should be convenient. Make sure you schedule it for a time that works for your target audience. For B2B webinars, consider mid-week. Monday is the day most people like to get work done and dive into tasks left over from the week before, while Friday is often a catch-up day.
Daniel Waas shared results from a study he and his team conducted during his time at GoToWebinar. They looked at data from over half a million webinars and found that attendance was highest on Wednesday and Thursday. Likewise, mid-day – 11 am and the early afternoon – are the times of day that attract the most registrants.
4. Promote When People Are Likely to Sign Up
The same research found that mornings are the best time to send emails promoting your webinar. From 8 am to 10 am, people are more likely to register than they are later in the day.
You also don’t need to start regularly promoting too far in advance. You can send an announcement email, for example, a save-the-date message, two or three months ahead of time or earlier. Then, about four weeks before the event, start sending regular emails, increasing your frequency as you close in on the date.
Most people sign up to attend within one week, so use those final days to send out multiple emails, including one the morning of, to attract last-minute sign-ups.
5. Use Compelling CTAs and an Equally Compelling Registration Page
Every piece of promotional content should include a compelling call-to-action. Include a register or sign-up button or link in your emails, blog content, social posts, and digital ads. Clicking on the CTA should take them to a landing page, purpose-built to encourage registrations.
The webinar registration page should contain clear information on why someone should register, what value they’ll gain, and what they can expect from the experience. This content doesn’t need to be long. In fact, a crisp paragraph and a bullet list of benefits followed by your sign-up form are plenty. You can also include a video on the page to drive your conversion rate up – landing page videos are known to increase conversions by as much as 80 percent.
6. Send a Thank-You Email for Registering
Once someone registers, send out a thank you message. This isn’t only a goodwill message that can make your registrants feel like their attendance is valued. It’s also a great tactic for reminding people about your webinar. Include a reminder to put it on their calendar, so your event doesn’t get lost in the mix of busy workdays and overloaded email inboxes from the time of registration until event day.
7. Automate Email Promotion
With the right webinar solution, promoting your email is simple. Intermedia AnyMeeting Webinar is a platform designed for businesses to help foster digital connections. You can invite your existing email list with custom invitations, registration pages, and email reminders – all of these tools are included in the software.
During the webinar, engage participants with live Q&A sessions, real-time pools, rich-chat features, and more. Post-webinar, send out follow-up emails, surveys, and quizzes to keep the engagement level high and encourage more conversions.
Learn more about how easy it is to create high-quality virtual events from wherever with Intermedia AnyMeeting Webinar.
The Intermedia Team
Intermedia helps businesses of all sizes connect better – through voice, video conferencing, chat, contact center, business email and productivity, file sharing and backup, security, archiving, and more – from wherever, whenever. And, as a partner-first company, Intermedia goes to work for our channel partners to help them grow their revenue and maximize their success.
April 20, 2021
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