What is a webinar? If you’re new to marketing, a webinar is a hosted event online, where presentations and discussion around a specific topic are conducted. Webinars are different from videos because webinars consist of a presenter(s) and attendees which helps you to speak to your audience directly.
Hosting a webinar is an effective way to garner interest and gather prospects in marketing simultaneously. Marketing a webinar is a primary concern and a process that takes some level of concentrated effort.
Here is a list of best practices to follow when organizing a webinar:
- To promote a webinar, you’ll want to take a multifaceted approach and utilize both internal and external connections and partnerships. Hosting a webinar that involves a partner can be a mutually beneficial arrangement and help garner interest from a wider range of prospective attendees.
- You’ll want to begin marketing as early as you have dates set and hosts arranged and continue up until the webinar begins.
- Marketing a webinar will involve multiple marketing channels, so you should use everyone you have at your disposal, including a marketing mix of social media, email, and offline channels.
The caption for webinar posts should be relevant for your attendees. Webinar promotion examples include paid ads, promotional emails, and posts including banners and pop-ups on your website and social media.
Most of us have now transitioned our in-person events to virtual events and webinars with the remote work scenario. According to On 24, 95% of businesses believe webinars are an important part of their marketing strategy.
What is webinar marketing?
Webinar marketing is one of the most crucial parts of your entire effort. Webinar marketing is a marketing activity through online platforms. It can include thought leadership topics, educational webinars on your products and services or any trending topic which is relevant for your audience.
No two approaches are identical, but there are some common threads in successful webinar marketing. While you can access many webinar marketing templates online the best ones are those which closely match your webinar topic and align with your goals.
You’ll want to design each part of your webinar marketing strategy to be as inviting as possible for the specific audience segments you hope to reach with your marketing efforts. Bear in mind what platforms they commonly use online, what are their interests and motivations. This will inform your webinar topic and your channel mix.
Here’s 10 basic steps to include for the ultimate webinar checklist:
- What do you hope to gain? Who should attend? Determine your topic and create your script
- Choose the dates, featured guests and speakers, and the format for the webinar
- Set up a landing page and registration links
- Begin marketing on all channels—email, social media, etc. Multi touch campaigns are the best to reach your audience repeatedly with consistent message
- Assemble full presentation, begin preparation, and flesh out details
- Practice, practice, and practice to ensure the presentation is smooth
- Finalize presentation
- Send follow ups to interested people to register a few days before the webinar
- After the webinar send out a follow up and thank you email for all participants and speakers and request their feedback and any topics they would like to be included in the next webinar
- Follow up with no shows – People who registered for the webinar but did not show up. Offer them a piece of content and dates for the next webinar.
Remember, that marketing must begin early. Leave yourself a few weeks to garner increased interest and ensure that you have a landing page and registration set up before you begin promoting it.
You’ll want to make sure that interested prospective attendees have the links handy to go for more information and register early. This will continue on right up until the webinar begins. You’ll want to make sure that you record the webinar so that you can use it later for promotions and to share with your guest list, if anyone should ask for it.
Post webinar, you’ll have a chance to survey attendees and determine future improvements. This is significant because it will help to understand which aspects will drive successful engagement for the next show.
Fill in your pipeline with interested buyers with targeted webinars.
Webinar marketing ideas
There are many ways to market your webinar, and since it is an online event, the majority of them are through online marketing channels. The foremost strategy should be to keep a steady online presence on social media leading up to, during, and after the webinar. If you’re looking for some webinar marketing examples, consider the following:
Leading up to the webinar, create online events for the scheduled date, post about it periodically, and keep an eye on engagement with promotion materials during your webinar campaign. You’ll also want to put your webinar on webinar listing sites, where people commonly go to sign up for and keep up with upcoming events.
Webinar social media posts examples include regular posts about the webinar including images, rhetorical questions for viewers, and short video clips with compelling content related to the webinar.
When promoting your webinar on social media there are a lot of approaches, but some common ones include asking engaging questions. Think of it like a pre-webinar poll. Also ensure that you keep your social media posts educational and engaging for your audience. Remember that your ultimate goal is to drive attendance and make your audience interested in your event.
Some of the best ways to promote your webinar is through earned media as 25-40% of all traffic and lead generation comes from earned media.
If you are still short of driving attendance to your webinar, you can also choose to hire a demand generation agency to drive registrations for your webinar. At ViB, we help our clients boost webinar attendance by promoting their webinar to our community of millions.
Finally, while email drives the most number of attendees for any event, videos, images, and infographics are most rewarding when it comes to webinar promotions. People are generally drawn to images and videos, and by asking questions, providing an exclusive sneak peek about the webinar or keeping it informational in your captions you’ll increase the likelihood of engagement on a post.
Marketing webinar topics
One of the most important parts of creating a webinar strategy is the topic that your webinar covers. This should be informed by your target audience segment and the goals you have set for your webinar.
If you do webinars for a B2B audience, you can cover topics that are related to your company’s services and products specifically, or a topic related to a customer pain point, solutions offered and what experts do to solve the pain point.
Some examples include workshops on relevant field operations, product or service demonstrations, and expert presentations. Marketing webinar topics might include common marketing frameworks of workshops.
Here are some helpful steps involved in defining a webinar topic:
- Ask yourself, why do you want to do a webinar? What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish? Brand awareness, acquire leads, showcase your expertise etc. I most cases it is all of the above but you can choose a specific segment
- Choose your audience. Who is your target audience? What are their pain points and what solutions do they usually look for? A quick search will help you determine your audience segment.
- Get feedback. By now you have a short list of webinar topics. A discussion with your team will help you to flesh out your ideas and bring them to life.
- Use historical data. Finally, if you have done webinars in the past look at each one of them to understand the audience, topic, number of attendees and post event engagement. This will help you to use previous experience to guide topic selection and improvements.
Social media marketing webinars involve a lot of the same thought process. Include relevant topics that will be covered in your webinar, and ensure that you’re putting out posts and ads that are appealing to your audience for those purposes. Remember, the goal is not just attendance, but attendance of desired attendees in your field.
Webinar strategy
A lot will go into your overall webinar strategy, but some of the most important things to remember are: your goals, desired audience, what topics you’ll cover, and marketing your webinar. Remind yourself of your overall webinar marketing strategy at each stage.
You’ll also need to pin down some of the logistics in more detail as you put your webinar together, one of the most important being how you will host your webinar. You may wonder how to make a webinar on zoom.
Zoom is such a commonly used video conferencing software, but be prepared to understand how to facilitate large meetings of people. It is important to remain aware of logistical challenges like whether participants are muted by default or not, if screen sharing is enabled, and sharing a password if you plan to use one.
You might be wondering how to start a webinar speech, and the simple answer is: with an introduction. Once the majority of your attendees are settled in and ready to begin, you can start by introducing yourself, and the topic you’ll be covering.
When it comes to how to start a webinar, introductions are nearly always a good route to take. It might help to offer some background on yourself as well as the topic you’re discussing, including things like why you’re discussing it, to whom it might be useful, and some of the smaller subsets of topics you’ll be covering in the larger overall discussion.
Be sure at each stage of the webinar to engage with your audience. Leave time for questions, and be prepared to ask them questions if applicable.
Webinar email marketing strategy
Your webinar email marketing strategy will be an important component of your overall webinar strategy. According to WebinarCare, around 60% of people register for webinar events via email.
Remember that your goals for hosting this webinar should inform not only the content and topics covered, but how you go about marketing the webinar, in particular through your email channels.
Some important things to include in your email for webinar promotions are:
- An easy link to registration—ensuring that it’s placed rather high up in the email since you can’t be sure if recipients will open emails on mobile devices or want to scroll down to find it
- Use a compelling but straightforward subject line
- Make sure you’re using a credible signature—a human name.
You can find some webinar email templates online, or even create your own if you’re planning to hold recurring webinars. Make sure that the email contents are refreshed each time you reuse a template.
The best subject lines for webinars include relevant information and might include a call to action. Avoid overly vague subject lines, and make sure that it’s clear you’re inviting recipients to your webinar.
Some webinar invitation subject line examples include reminder language like “don’t forget,” or “you’re invited,” or call users to register. You can also talk about the impact the webinar will have—for instance, “You’ll learn x in next week’s webinar.” You can make it clear it is an invite to a webinar and keep it interesting at the same time.
You’ll also want to send regular reminders and webinar notifications as the webinar draws closer. Webinar email reminder examples are emails that are shorter than the original but keep the important parts like the link to registration and basic information, and add simple link reminders.
Webinar marketing may not be an easy task. With the rise in the number of webinars, driving attendance and commonalities in topics could force you to think out of the box to meet your goals. While companies drive end to end webinar campaigns on their own, many B2B businesses partner with agencies that are successful in driving webinar attendance and are within your budget.
