How to Promote a Webinar

Anyone looking to successfully host a webinar is also looking to attract as many potential viewers as possible.

After all, no one will know if the best presentation in the world has happened if no one actually gets to see it. That begs the question: how do you make sure your target audiences find your webinar, sign up, and tune in?

There are four main avenues for webinar promotion: email marketing, social media marketing, paid search campaigns, and clever use of your company’s website. We’ll go in depth on how to best use all these tools to promote your webinar.

Email marketing

Email campaigns are a great solution when it comes to webinar promotion. In most cases, you’ll be able to use existing newsletter lists to reach out to already-warm prospects and existing customers. Email marketing is also easy to automate, with a lot of different platforms and tools available to help carry the proverbial weight. For email marketing, we have a few simple tips:

• Construct the perfect headline. Make sure the headline mentions the webinar. That’ll tell you that any clicks you see on your analytics were from potentially interested parties. Be urgent but not pushy and try your best to be personable. 
• Make sure you have your emails scheduled far enough in advance. A webinar is an event, and just like any event, people need to plan for it. These days most folks don’t have a spare hour on short notice. Make sure they have plenty of time to learn about, look into, and sign up for your webinar. 
• Use your own email addresses. An easy way to use email marketing for webinar promotion without sending any actual promotional mail is by including a link to your webinar’s landing page in all staff email signatures. Easy to do, zero cost, and any communique by your employees will likely be with the sort of audiences you want in attendance.

Social media

Social media is foundational to most digital marketing plans these days, and for good reason. It’s a way to reach your target audiences directly, to answer their questions, and to hear their inquiries. When it comes to webinar promotion, it can be an effective tool as long as you follow a couple rules of thumb:

• Choose your platforms wisely. There are a ton of social media channels, so how do you choose which one is for you? It depends on your industry and the type of presentation you plan on giving. That said, we’ve found that Twitter gets the most conversions in the science and tech spaces and LinkedIn is a good place to go when promoting B2B-based content.
• Plan things out in advance. Create a posting schedule and use one of the many marketing automation tools on the market to take the worry out of consistent promotion of your webinar.

Paid search

Successful paid search campaigns require a little more finesse than other, less complex marketing maneuvers. That said, they can be exceptionally effective. Paid search allows you to reach your target audience in a very specific way. The two best paid search approaches for webinar promotion are:

• Limited campaigns with highly-specific keywords. If you’re going to run webinar promotion ads, you’re going to want to make sure that people know exactly what they’re in for. Highly-specific keyword usage like “webinar”, “training”, or “class” will help you make sure the clicks you get are focused. The ad copy should also be highly specific. 
• Retargeting ads. Retargeting ads are great because they have a lower cost per click and will show up for users who have shown initial interest in your company (i.e. visited your website) but haven’t yet converted.

Your website

You already have a website that prospects visit to learn more about you. Tap into that by setting up conversion forms on high-traffic or high-engagement areas of your site. These pages typically include the home page, contact page, and thank you pages. Capitalize on your existing inbound traffic to bring both attention and viewership to your webinar. These conversion forms could be a “toast” style notification, or an exit-intent form that appears when someone is leaving a page. 

Creating a webinar promotion plan should be an integral process of any webinar development. This post gives you the tools you’ll need to begin and the knowledge to get things moving. For everything else, and if you’re interested in some firsthand webinar hosting expertise, give our team at Windmill Strategy a call. We offer free consultations and customizable service programs to fit the particular needs of your industrial or manufacturing business.