Webinars have become a popular way for businesses to build brand awareness and promote themselves in recent years. No webinar can help you gain new clients or promote your brand if nobody shows up to the event, however! Therefore, it’s important for entrepreneurs and marketing teams to know how to effectively promote their webinar, so they can maximize attendance. Here are seven tips on how you can advertise your webinar and maximize your registrants to make your event a business success.
1. Advertise the Webinar on Your Website
If you’re hosting a webinar, chances are that you or your brand already own a domain and promote yourself online in some way. Therefore, you should take advantage of any and all organic traffic you receive by promoting your upcoming webinar on your brand website.
You can promote a webinar on your website in several different ways. First and foremost, put a banner or pop-up on your homepage. This gives your webinar a prominent placement for anyone who visits your site. These banners are usually easy to make and add, and they are relatively low in cost compared to other promotion methods as well.
Since not everyone lands on your homepage, you’ll want to place information about the webinar in other relevant places on your website too. This includes related landing pages, popular blog posts, and any sort of event pages or calendars you display on your website.
2. Promote the Webinar Through Organic Social Media Posts
Nearly every company, influencer, and entrepreneur has social media pages now. These pages provide another place to promote your upcoming webinar with followers, without spending a ton of money on advertising. They are also great ways to put information in front of people who will likely register—your current fans.
Obviously, promoting your webinar on social media requires some knowledge of social media best practices, including post timing and hashtag use, but the same practices you use for other posts can easily be transferred to webinar promotional posts. Just make sure you use graphics or images to your advantage and really sell the content of your webinar to entice people to register and attend.
3. Use Email Marketing to Promote Your Webinar
Many brands already run efficient email marketing campaigns for sales and other types of brand promotions, so it only makes sense to also leverage the tool to promote your webinars. Since data shows that nearly 70 percent of all webinar attendees register through an email they receive, it only makes sense to capitalize on it.
To use email marketing for your webinar, send the first email approximately 4 weeks before the scheduled webinar date. Then, send reminder emails weekly until the week of the webinar, when you’ll want to send out an additional email 2 days before the event. Of course, you’ll also want to send reminder emails to registrants the day before the webinar.
That being said, don’t just include the webinar info in these emails. Instead, give subscribers a reason to attend the webinar. Mention it as a sort of call to action at the end of your message. This will help keep click rates on your emails high, which will, in turn, yield higher registrant results.
4. Optimize Your Webinar Registration Page
While you want to attract committed customers to your webinar, you also want to use the webinar to gain new followers and clients. That means if you’ve created a custom landing page for your webinar registration, you want to optimize it to gain organic search results, just like any other part of your website.
In addition to optimizing the text to highlight related keywords that may generate search engine results, make sure you optimize the registration process itself so people are more likely to register and attend. To do this, include the benefits of the webinar, include any needed content that may help people decide if the webinar is right for them, and keep the registration form as minimal as possible. All of this will help boost the conversion rate, which will ultimately get you the most attendees.
5. Write Relevant Blog Posts to Tease the Webinar
Webinars and virtual workshops have become so popular in the marketing world, but they’re a serious time commitment for consumers. As a result, many people aren’t willing to commit to one unless they really see the benefit of the workshop. Luckily, you can combat this by providing other content ahead of the webinar that attracts interest in the content and builds excitement around the topic you plan to cover during the webinar itself.
As you plan your marketing strategy for the upcoming webinar, think about what related topics or details people may want to read about. Next, write relevant blog posts that provide readers with some information, but not enough to completely satisfy them. You can end the posts with short calls to action that encourage interested readers to register for the upcoming webinar and learn even more about the topic presented in the blog post. Chances are, reading what you already shared will motivate them to register.
6. Take Advantage of Social Media Ads
Although you should never blow your entire budget on paid advertising, setting aside some money for social media ads can help you boost your webinar registration, especially if you work with an ads agency or marketing team who knows how to effectively advertise the content.
Targeted advertisements often help you increase your brand’s conversion rate through repeated exposure to your company’s message. Since only 2% of people typically commit to anything online after their first glance, these types of ads help you net more interested parties and turn them into loyal customers.
7. Offer an Incentive for Webinar Registration or Attendance
We live in a world where everyone loves discounts and freebies. While this often bothers business-minded individuals, it is an incentive you can use to your advantage when offering a webinar or workshop. When someone is on the fence about signing up or attending, an incentive can often serve as icing on the cake to get them to commit.
Keep in mind that these incentives don’t even have to be huge or expensive. They can be something as simple as a free sample of a product, an entry into a giveaway drawing, or some other sort of small recognition that your audience would enjoy.
You can use incentives in multiple ways, depending on your goals for the webinar. For example, you can offer a digital freebie for anyone who registers or set up a drawing at the end of your webinar for anyone who attended. Furthermore, you can drive additional traffic by offering incentives to people who refer others to your webinar on their own. Remember, small incentives work just as well as large ones, and they can all help you reach your registration and attendance goals for the upcoming webinar.
Although you want to make sure that you provide the best possible webinar experience for anyone who attends, those efforts are useless if you don’t promote your webinar first. Luckily, these seven tips can help you maximize your registration rate and, with any luck, increase your overall webinar attendance too.
