How to promote your next webinar

The topic has been chosen, the speaker booked, and the deck polished to perfection, yet one crucial piece of the puzzle remains to make your webinar a success: participants.  With all the hard work, planning, and financial investment that goes into producing quality content, the question of how to promote a webinar becomes all the more critical.

There are lots of effective ways to advertise a webinar online, but also intense competition for people’s attention and time. Becoming familiar with the proven strategies and known pitfalls of webinar marketing can help you craft a solid strategy for attracting a high-quality audience to your next webinar.

Jump to:

• Planning your promotion ahead
• Best practices of promoting a webinar
• 5 practical Ways to Promote a Webinar
• Final Thoughts

Planning your promotion ahead

The key to promoting a webinar is to start early.  It takes time for word to spread and for people to register so don’t wait until the last few days before the event.  Instead, the marketing campaign should kick off with a formal announcement several weeks or months prior and build up as the webinar approaches.

Determine what goals you aim to achieve with the webinar and based on that, your target audience.  Once you identify whom the webinar is meant to appeal to, and the online spaces they inhabit, it will be easier to know how to best allocate your time and resources to reach them.

At the same time, use your existing email lists to reach people with a known interest in the topic.  You can use automated emails to smoothly execute a pre-planned email campaign.  Increase the frequency of the emails as the event gets closer to remind people it’s coming up.  It’s nice to send an email after the webinar has concluded to thank them for participating and perhaps provide a link to the recording.

Best practices for promoting a webinar

Keep your promotions highly targeted by building high-quality email lists and actively participating in online groups related to the topics covered in your webinars.

It’s helpful to demonstrate social proof when promoting a webinar.  Reinforce your value proposition–what people can gain from attending–with testimonials, like those from past participants.

Always look for ways to add urgency.  People must feel that there is a reason they need to sign up immediately rather than put it off.  For example, there could be a deadline for pre-registration, which would provide exclusive access or media for those who don’t miss it.

Make the registration process as frictionless as possible.  Forms should be short and informative, describing exactly what the registrant can expect to happen next. Send a confirmation email immediately after registration with the link to the webinar and calendar information.

5 practical Ways to Promote a Webinar

1.   Promote your webinar on social media

Social media offers both organic and paid options for getting the word out to your target audience.  Post about the webinar regularly on both your company’s page and your personal accounts. Encourage your co-workers to post on their profiles as well to cover as much ground as possible.  If there are speakers/presenters from outside the organization, arrange for them to also promote the webinar on social media and their website. Choose a unique hashtag for the webinar and use it consistently in posts across all platforms.

If you are active in online groups that are relevant to the webinar topic, go ahead and send a few messages to the group along with a registration link. This is where the networking you did earlier will pay off, as it will not seem out of place for an active member of the group to post about their webinar.

Paid social advertising is also a great way to reach your prospective audience members directly.  All the major platforms have intuitive ad management tools to target users with the specific interests and characteristics you are trying to reach.  The ads you upload to social media should always include the webinar’s unique selling points, a compelling call to action, and company branding.

Consider which social media sites should be prioritized in promoting your webinar.  For example, LinkedIn could be a good choice if the subject is career-related, but if it’s more about lifestyle then Facebook might be a better fit.  Different sites also value different kinds of media.  Twitter attracts users looking for concise writing while Instagram offers high-quality images and videos, and so on, so make sure your promotional content is specifically geared towards the platforms you’re on.

2.   Collaborate with influencers

The rise of social media influencers has made it easier than ever to advertise to highly specific market segments. Collaborating with an influencer that is aligned with your webinar topic allows you to reach a target audience that has already shown an active interest in the subject.  Influencers are also widely trusted by their followers, meaning that their recommendations carry a lot of weight with their audience members.

Make sure the influencer is also aligned with your organization’s values and reinforces your brand message.  Remember that different influencers have varying reach such as micro-influencers with tens of thousands of followers and mega-influencers with 1M+ subscribers.  The larger the reach, the higher their fee, of course.  Try to find an influencer that is right for your topic and budget, then build a relationship with that influencer for future collaborations.

3.   Proper landing page optimization

Create a dedicated landing page for the webinar you are promoting and have all marketing materials link to that page.  Keep the landing page simple and free of clutter with a clear headline containing your value proposition.  Most people will not scroll down very far and if they do, they will probably be skimming, so the most important information should appear at the top of the page.  That’s where viewers should be able to find info about the speaker (with a photo), the topics that will be covered, and scheduling information.

Include social proof in the form of testimonials from people who have benefitted from this speaker’s talks in the past.  Make your call-to-action button as prominent as possible with active language like “sign me up”, “reserve my spot”, etc.  Just to be safe, place another call-to-action button towards the end for those who scroll down.  Certain webinar platforms, like Kaltura, provide a branded microsite and matching landing page as part of a standard webinar plan.

4.   Create teaser videos

Shoot short videos featuring your speakers/presenters promoting the webinar and explaining how viewers will be able to benefit from participating.  This can be used on social media, in emails as links, and on the landing page.  People tend to engage more with short-form videos online so social media algorithms prioritize that type of content.  Videos are also beneficial for search engine optimization (SEO), meaning that Google and other search engines will drive more traffic to your landing page if it has video.

5.   Offer a free bonus for webinar participants

It never hurts to offer a little incentive to those who go ahead and register to attend the webinar.  This may be the small push some people need to commit.  The bonus could be anything you think your participants might find valuable such as discounts to your business, exclusive media in the form of ebooks, or entrance into a raffle drawing.  These bonuses could also be a way to create urgency in the viewer’s mind to sign up, for example, “complete your registration in the next 30 minutes to receive…”

Final Thoughts

Deciding how to promote your webinar in the current digital landscape can be a challenge in many ways.  People are busy and have too many options when it comes to watching content online.  Still, a carefully planned and confidently implemented marketing strategy combined with high-value content will allow you to cut through the noise and reach an online audience looking for exactly the type of webinar you have to offer.