Hosting a webinar means nothing if no one turns up to it.
If you want your webinar to work for your brand, generating listens and leads, you'll need to actively promote it.
Luckily, there is a wide range of proven webinar promotion strategies that will help you ensure that more people register and turn up to the webinar on the day.
In this article we'll show you some of the most effective strategies, that range from completely free, to paid, and to earned strategies that will lead to other companies promoting your event.
Let's jump into the strategies.
Paid Webinar Promotion Tactics
If you're looking for big results you should consider paid promotion tactics. These will help your webinar gain extra reach and be seen by more of your target market than would otherwise be possible. Let's take a look at the tactics.
1. Internal Results
If you want to see huge results from your webinar and have as many qualified attendees as possible, consider working with us at Internal Results. With our content syndication service we can target key decision-makers in your market and create highly specific campaigns that are going to boost your attendee count.
Using buyer intent data we can track buyers who are actively researching and in the market for your solution and can target them with your content.
Once your webinar attendees have signed up, you'll have their contact data and be able to follow up post-event and nurture them towards a purchase.
We'll use the most relevant channels to promote your webinar, from paid ads, to email marketing, to telemarketing. Our multi-channel approach will guarantee your promotion has a wide, but highly targeted reach and will help you boost your attendance and generate leads.
2. Facebook Ads
If you're a B2B company, Facebook Ads are a great option. 89% of B2B companies run Facebook ads. But why focus on it?
Nearly all of your buyers will have a Facebook account, even if it's only for personal use. Thanks to Facebook's powerful ad targeting options you can still use FB to re-target your buyers and effectively promote your webinar.
You can use ad options like Lead Ads to drive sign-ups straight from Facebook without even needing to direct leads to a landing page.
3. LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads are very powerful lead generation tool for B2B marketers. You can target by a range of firmographic criteria such as industry, job title, seniority, location, and more.
If you're already running ABM campaigns then LinkedIn Ads can help you target key accounts and drive webinar sign-ups from your pre-qualified leads.
We definitely recommend testing LinkedIn Ads to promote your webinar. It does have a higher Cost-Per-Click than Facebook, with an average CPC of $6.50. But, the granular targeting options and the fact that it's a popular site for B2B decision-makers to spend their time on.
4. Google Ads
When you think of Google Ads, webinar promotion isn't the first option you think of.
However, for high-cost products of services (which are typically in the B2B market), ads that drive searchers towards a webinar can be very effective.
You can create a custom webinar landing page (we'll talk about this further on in the article) that matches your searchers' intent.
As search ads are targeted at very purchase intent-based queries (usually), you need to ensure that the webinar landing page will be what the searcher expects to see.
If you usually use product demos or webinars in your lead nurturing process, then driving leads to your webinar is likely to be effective. If, on the other hand, your leads always expect a personal 1:1 call or meeting (or the opposite - they want to purchase immediately), then a webinar may not be as effective.
Free Webinar Promotion Tactics
Now, we're going to look at some free ways to promote your landing page. It's important to note that these will never be completely 'free'. You'll need to spend time on them if you expect them to drive results. The key difference is that you won't need to pay for reach like you would with paid ads.
1. Create a Landing Page
One of the first things you do when deciding you're ready to host a webinar is to create a landing page.
Your landing page could be one of the very first things your prospects see. It's a key opportunity to convey the value of your webinar and tell visitors why they should attend.
You'll need to explain how it will benefit their lives, and it's also a great opportunity to show why your hosts are experts on the topic.
We recommend including a sign-up form with several fields including job title, company name, and phone number. These will be useful for post-webinar follow-ups and lead nurturing. You'll also be able to accurately track the success of your webinar and see how qualified attendees are and if they'll be a fit for your solution.
2. Website Notification Bar
Your website traffic is one of the most of the most valuable things your business has. You need to take advantage of your traffic and ensure you're promoting your webinar to everyone that arrives on your website, even if they aren't previously aware that you're hosting a webinar.
A notification bar is a great way to show them.
As you can see in the image above, Stripe uses a notification bar to notify visitors about relevant product and industry updates. You could do the exact same, but promote your webinar on it.
It's still not the main call-to-action, but it catches the site visitors' attention.
A notification bar is relatively easy to implement. Nearly all site builders will have the capability to implement this, and if you have a development team it should be easy to add even if your site is completely custom.
3. Email Your List
Email is one of the best available tactics to promote your webinar. It's so good that it drives 57% of webinar signups based on data from GoToMeeting.
If you've built up an email list, you should definitely be promoting your webinar to your subscribers.
We recommend sending several emails, with a delay in between each one.
This will mean that you build awareness for the webinar, and even if someone forgets to sign-up after the first email, the follow-up emails will remind them and encourage them to take action.
You'll be able to send them to your dedicated webinar landing page to further prove the benefits of signing up.
4. Community Engagement
A great way to build an audience for your upcoming webinar is to engage in relevant communities.
Whatever niche your business operates in, you'll find a Facebook Group for it. You can engage in the group and let members know about the event you're hosting.
There are also a wide range of LinkedIn Groups, as well as Slack communities that cover a range of niches and interests.
Community engagement works best when you spend time in the community, provide value, and don't only go there to promote your content.
5. Social Media
As well as using communities, you should post about your webinar on your company's social media channels. If possible, your team should also post from their personal accounts, if their following matches or has cross-over with your target market.
Use pinned tweets on Twitter, and regularly post about the event in the run-up to it on LinkedIn and Facebook.
6. Mention It in Previous Webinars
Now, this only works if you've already ran webinars.
If you regularly run webinars or are hosting a few all around a similar date, then you should mention your upcoming webinar in your previous ones.
Assuming your target audience for each webinar has a cross-over, this is a powerful way to drive ongoing engagement from your attendees. If you see some of your attendees showing up at multiple webinars, you can start to qualify them and they may be a great person to reach out further about your solution.
7. Host a Replay
It's a great feeling when you see people attending your webinar live. But, if you want your webinar to generate long-term benefits then you should be posting the replay too.
By posting a replay and hosting it on your website or YouTube channel you'll ensure that far more people see it than they would otherwise.
For example, in the image below you'll see Demand Curve post their webinars on their YouTube channel.
Within a few months, their webinar replays all garner a large number of views and make the time spent on the webinar even more worth it.
'Earned' Webinar Promotion
If you can get other people or companies to promote your webinar you'll be in a great position.
Your marketing team will be able to gain leverage and spend less time manually promoting it, and you can save money that may otherwise be sent on ads. Let's look at some ways you can make this happen.
1. Co-Host Your Webinar
The first major way of earning co-promotion is to co-host your webinar.
You'll often see this webinars co-hosted by companies with complementary solutions who are selling to the same market, but not competing for customers.
The benefits of this are that you'll essentially double your audience size and tap into your fellow co-hosts audience. They'll be likely to promote your webinar on their own social media channels and send it to their own email list.
Recap: Effective Webinar Promotion Tactics
Hosting a webinar is a great way to generate leads, but it's only going to be effective if people turn up and watch.
We hope that these webinar promotion ideas will help you kick start your efforts and help you start growing your attendee list.
If you want a more hands-off approach and want to promote your webinar to your ideal customers with the help of a dedicated team, Internal Results can help.
