Top 9 Webinar Promotion Tips & Tricks

If you’re seeing webinars around every corner, then you’re not going crazy. They are. 57% of marketers run 50 webinars or more a year! That’s a lot of webinars for one marketer and there are a lot of marketers in this world.

The thing is, well-produced webinars, focused on specific industry topics, and hosted by dynamic presenters are effective. They make business sense. 48% of B2B buyers say webinars are the most valuable content (MVC?) for making a final purchasing decision.

So, nearly 50% of your potential customers are making purchasing decisions based on the webinars you produce. Unfortunately for you, if you build it, they might not come. That’s why webinar promotion is key to the success of your webinars.

At Kaltura, we produce a lot of webinars. Chances are, if you’re reading this, then you’ve probably even joined a Kaltura webinar. In fact, channeling my internal Troy McClure, you may remember me from such Kaltura webinars as I’m Quitting and Here’s Why: Creating a Meaningful L&D Experience for the New Generation of Employees and Connecting with More Students in a Hybrid World – Innovative Student Recruitment Strategies in Higher Education.

Taking our experience, we’re going to share our top tips & tricks for bringing in an engaged webinar audience through webinar promotion.

What is webinar promotion?

Webinar promotion refers to any activity that promotes your webinar. Webinar promotion starts at the foundation of the webinar itself – such as a topic your customers want to hear about (industry trends) that they cannot get much info on (find your niche), hosted by speakers that can hold a conversation, and scheduled midweek around 2 PM ET (if you’re targeting the US).

The focus then moves to drive customers and partners to your webinar and continues beyond the webinar itself with follow-up and relevant CTAs. Let’s unpack some additional practical tips to help your webinar promotion.

Best webinar promotion & marketing tips

Now that we have our webinar scheduled and speakers lined up, it’s time to promote our webinar. Below we’ll share some of the tips and tricks we use to maximize the success of our webinars.

Make it compelling

Above, we mentioned that you want to have a compelling topic that isn’t too broad and offers unique insights that you and your speakers can expand upon. If you do that well, then you’re going to grab attention.

Beyond that, we need to think about the experience. What’s in it for your attendees? Why do they need to come now rather than watch it later?

Not only is the topic important, but so is the experience and the experience often comes down to engagement. 92% of attendees want some form of a Q&A.

Make it clear that your webinar is not only a chance to take away interesting information, but it’s also a chance to interact with the speakers and actively participate in the discussion.

Set up a landing page

A landing page is a web page that your potential webinar attendees will visit or “land on” when they hear about your webinar. The goal of the landing page is to be directly related to your webinar and provide clear calls to action (CTAs) which should be to register for your upcoming webinar.

You’ll want to have the following on the page:

• Name of your webinar
• Date and time
• Speakers and presenter information
• A brief description
• Registration form – only include fields that you need for further outreach. Each field added causes a significant drop-off.

Don’t put too much information on this page as the action you are encouraging is specific. You want folks to register to attend your webinar. Everything else is noise.

Email sequences

Ideally, you should have at least two full weeks to drum up excitement for your webinar. To be sure, this means you’ll probably need one additional week before that (three weeks total for those counting) to secure the presenters and assets required for your webinar promotion.

Once you have your landing page, you can start promoting your webinar and emails are a good place to start. If your organization has an email distribution list of current or potential customers, then be sure to go through that to ensure you are targeting the right folks.

You indeed want to target as many people as possible. But if you send irrelevant invites, then people will start to ignore you.

Email automation tools help you automatically send invites that will send email sequences if no action has been taken. Your first email should be sent about 2 weeks before the webinar, a second 3-5 days before, and then a third should be sent the day of as a final reminder.

With your email sequences, you are trying to get people that haven’t signed up to register for your webinar and to remind those that have signed up that the webinar is still happening.

Thank yous and confirmations

Yes, these are also emails, but they’re a bit different. Once someone fills out a registration form to join your webinar, they need the information on how to join.

So, after registering, they should get an automatic confirmation that they have successfully registered. Ideally, this email should include the link to the webinar and even an “add to calendar” option to add the webinar to their calendar with a single click.

On the flipside, thank you emails should be sent to everyone that registered. You should have one email for those that joined and another for those that didn’t. The language of each should be relevant to the audience.

Thank you emails must include additional “calls to action”. Perhaps it will include a link to a recording of the webinar to be shared by your customers or an invite to continue the conversation one-on-one.

Tell folks you’ll be recording

This might sound counterintuitive, but you want to let folks know you will be recording your webinar. Of course, we want attendees to join us in real-time and encourage real engagement. However, not everyone is available when the webinar is taking place.

By letting folks know you will be recording and sharing a recording of the webinar, you are encouraging more registration. Maybe registrants won’t be able to join, but they can still benefit from the recording. So, they’ll register to ensure they have access to the recording after the fact.

Get social

If you have a company or organization account with tens of thousands of followers, then post a link to your upcoming webinar. Let your engaged audiences know that you’re active in discussing the topics that are important to them.

Don’t limit yourself there. Corporate or organizational accounts don’t always get the best traction. Leverage your staff to get the word out to their audiences.

If you want to maximize their participation, then make it easy for them. Draft some social copy and provide them with a brief template to use (and hopefully personalize) to post on their various networks. You can also provide specific UTMs for each representative with an incentive for inviting the most attendees.

Website CTAs

Have a website that is getting a lot of traffic? Amazing. Websites and blogs are perfect tools for webinar promotion. Provide various “calls to action” as your website visitors navigate your site. There are a lot of ways to implement these calls to action:

• Pop-ups – Not everyone’s favorite tool, but effective. Pop up a link to register for your webinar when they scroll to a specific part of the page or take some sort of action.
• Fixed banner – As visitors scroll through a page, display a fixed banner that prompts them to register for the webinar.
• Tracking CTA – Similar to the fixed banner, a tracking CTA can “glue” itself to the left or right, or even the footer of the page.

Webinar within a webinar

When you have a captivated audience, you should also find ways to promote upcoming webinars. Chances are you aren’t stopping at one webinar so build your audience and start a webinar promotion for the next webinar before moving to Q&A.

Don’t wait for the last couple of minutes because people will drop off when you get closer to the end. I like to talk about the upcoming webinars we have planned right before Q&A. I also let attendees know that we’ll be sending a recording of the webinar plus information on upcoming sessions the following day.

Add a webinar page for continued traction

Most organizations have many people hosting webinars. It may be regionalized or for different verticals. Organize all your upcoming and past webinars on one web page or section of your website to let people easily find all the great content you’ve been producing.

This way, people can look through the history of past topics and even register to see previously recorded webinars. Webinars are awesome live, but they’re super effective on-demand as well. Recorded webinars are evergreen content to use and share at different times.

The main benefit of webinar marketing

Webinar marketing is a relatively inexpensive way to build an engaged audience. In an increasingly digital world, we see fewer and fewer of our customers. Most of our communication is asynchronous. We send emails, we send chats, but we don’t meet. Webinars allow us to connect in real-time with folks and have conversations that help our brand build relationships with our audience.

• Registration forms enter audience information in our CRMs for continued engagement
• Industry-specific webinars help establish your company as trusted experts and authorities in your field
• Guest speakers add credibility and provide cross-marketing channels
• Q&A provides awesome opportunities to listen and speak with potential customers

Kaltura’s webinar promotion solutions

We run webinars at Kaltura, and we use our own solutions for webinar promotion.

• Events Platform – Our Events Platform is used to create, manage, and measure our virtual events and webinars. Check out our evergreen Virtually Live! site if you want to see some amazing content. You can customize the look and feel of a webinar to match the topic in discussion and set up custom registration forms that integrate with your CRM to track and follow up with your audience. You have tons of data and a dashboard as well to keep track of how things are going.

• Meeting, Virtual Classrooms, and Interactive Rooms – Kaltura Meetings and Kaltura Virtual Classrooms are great platforms for hosting interactive, dynamic webinars with your audience. You can launch polls to get real-time reactions, quizzes to assess understanding, play videos as content, encourage peer-to-peer networking with breakout rooms and chat, and customize the look and feel for a fully branded, browser-based experience.

• Video Messaging – Stand out with video messaging. Video messages are incredibly powerful for webinar promotion. You can add your personality to your invites as well as share videos related to the topic. Afterward, follow-up can be the recording along with a personalized message and a playlist of relevant content.

To conclude

We went through a lot, and it may feel overwhelming. Or maybe you think you don’t have the audience or the ability to stand out from the crowd. You’ve made it this far so let’s end with the best tip. The best webinar promotion is consistency and commitment. Unless you have star caliber, then your first webinar might just have a few people. That’s ok. Keep at it. Over time your audience will build and grow as long as you consistently deliver webinars that are interesting to some, you can be sure there’s plenty of room for growth.