Webinars are becoming increasingly popular in the world of business. Leveraged correctly, they’re an effective and unique tool that can successfully level up your marketing strategies. 

Here’s how to market your webinar and attract more attendees. 

What is Webinar Marketing?

Webinar marketing refers to the techniques used to market a webinar. The goal behind these efforts is to encourage people to sign up so they can benefit from your expertise. This can open the door to offering additional products or services to attendees. 

Webinar marketing can be broken down into three stages: entice, capture, and foster. 

Stage 1: Entice

At this stage, you attract new attendees or customers through marketing methods that make initial contact. You’ll want to make your copy eye-catching to draw attention to what you’re marketing. The materials produced should be bold, straightforward, and address a problem your viewer has. 

Concentrate primarily on visual elements. When enticing customers, your interactions are going to be short with plenty of potential exit points. Your goal is to avoid losing engagement and keep viewers interested. 

For example, if your webinar is on the topic of effectively training employees, you might create an Instagram campaign comparing images of work done by well and poorly-trained staff. You can then invite your audience to share their experiences before introducing them to your webinar. 

To reach your target audience more effectively, look into video ad creation and learn how to design eye-catching images and video content for your social media. As the latter is visual and involves movement, it’s naturally more eye-catching than plain images and text. 

Stage 2: Capture 

This is the key stage for encouraging signups. Capture is when you convert a passive viewer of your advertising materials into an audience member. Consumers will become interested in longer-form content with more in-depth information. They may want to know about pricing, additional features, and the USPs of your product. 

This is where you can introduce your webinar as a problem-solving exercise. The below graph shows that 53 percent of survey respondents think there are too many webinars on the market, indicating the importance of getting your marketing right. 

Image source

This is something you should account for when planning social media content. Part of the capture stage is getting the balance right between eye-catching advertising materials and useful web copy. Social media is a great go-between for attracting and maintaining customer interest when running an event. 

Stage 3: Foster 

This is the stage where you nurture now-established customer relationships. You don’t need to advertise so aggressively once you reach it, but you do need to put time and effort into providing consistently high-quality content for your audience. 

For your webinar, you might consider regular emails containing related advice and content, including suggested extra reading or resource banks. 

Customer satisfaction metrics like those used in call centers are useful here. Fostering customer relationships is about keeping them consistently satisfied with your advice and content as well as your services. 

Gather customer satisfaction analytics data to understand how effective your webinar marketing strategy is and whether it needs improvement. 

Creating a Marketable Webinar

Now you know the bases to cover in your webinar marketing, how do you actually go about creating a marketable product? This section will go over the step-by-step process of turning your initial idea into a successful reality and provide advice on what works and what doesn’t.

Step #1: Choose Your Webinar Subject and Define Your Target Audience

A key factor in marketing any event is to identify your target audience based on the subject of your webinar. Start your planning by clearly defining the subject matter. Be specific and develop suitable content around this as you go. 

For example, if you’re working in real estate, you might host an open house virtual event. If you  feel this could be of interest to others, you could create a training webinar to share information on open house best practices and how to maximize the sales potential of a virtual open house.

 

Then, use your target location and subject matter to define your audience. If you’re based in Southern California, they may include regional real estate agents and fellow real estate businesses. You can then tailor ads by location as well as subject and interests. 

Step #2: Set Specific and Attainable Goals

Setting goals allows you to focus your planning efforts for the webinar on achieving these. This will make your webinar coherent and focused on offering attendees a tight and practiced event filled with practical advice.

Set yourself a way of measuring success. For example, an increase in conversions after your webinar over a set period. 

Step #3: Select a Webinar Format and Structure the Program Flow

People attend webinars to learn, so focus on creating a webinar structure that presents all of the information you want in a clear, digestible format. When deciding on a structure, consider who your audience is and what they want from your event. 

Once you’ve done this, work out the order of events. If you’ve got multiple speakers, make sure they know what they’re saying and when. Be sure to advertise all of your confirmed speakers to appeal to their audiences as well as yours.  

For example, if you’re hosting a virtual sales kickoff livestream, you’ll want a webinar that allows for interaction and teamwork. 

Seven Ways to Promote Your Webinar and Attract More Attendees

In this next section, we’ll discuss strategies to market your webinar and attract more attendees.

1. Create an eye-catching registration page

Visual marketing is key to attracting attendees, especially when everything is happening virtually. A well-designed registration page is one that’s intuitive to go through and uses complementary colors and designs. You want attendees to be able to find your call-to-action buttons quickly by eye and focus their attention on these. 

Also, put simply, a dull or garish registration page will deter attendees from registering, particularly if it’s difficult to use. 

2. Personalize the email invitations you send

This is all about relationship-building with attendees. Personalizing invites shows you’re committed to engaging on an individual level and will carry this through into the development of a customer relationship. 

3. Use social media to promote your webinar

To build a sense of urgency and awareness of your webinar, leverage paid social ads, countdowns on your Facebook page, post video trailers, and use other similar marketing tactics to reach your target audience. 

Image source: Actonic’s twitter account

Social media is an excellent tool for webinar marketing because it’s immediate. Using it to promote your event beforehand is a great way to target it directly to your audience. 

Some great examples of social media content you could produce are:

• Video content or trailers
• Invitations to contribute user-created content
• Regular reminders of sign-up instructions

It’s a good idea to start posting on your social channels long before your event. One or two months is suitable if it’s a one-off webinar or at least two weeks before if it’s recurring. 

4. Send out email reminders

Email reminders remind attendees your webinar is taking place without drowning them in unwanted communications. This sort of content is great for building relationships and establishing rapport. 

5. Collaborate with other brands

Collaborating with related brands can be mutually beneficial. For example, if your business holds a webinar on Facebook ad creation, you may partner with a company that’s successfully used this to grow its business. 

You can then engage in mutual promotion on your social media channels and among your clients. You may even invite them to speak at your webinar to give your audience a real-world experience of your services. 

A related strategy is to use brand ambassadors to promote your webinar. If you’re wondering how to get brand ambassadors, begin with some basic research into their role in your business.

6. Include a CTA on your website or blog

A call-to-action (CTA) invites customers to directly take action. By including one of these in blog posts about your webinar and on your site, you can directly encourage attendees to sign up for your event.  

7. Send a final webinar invitation the day before

Sending your attendees a final reminder puts your event at the forefront of their minds in the run-up to it and refocuses their attention on your brand. It also prevents attendees from forgetting your event or double-booking.

Three Post-Webinar Action Points for Further Promos

We’ll now go into some of the ways you can keep promoting your webinar after you’ve hosted it to boost your ongoing relationships with attendees. 

1. Thank attendees with an email or on social media

Sending a follow up email is a great way to thank attendees for coming and to foster an ongoing relationship with customers. 

It’s also an effective means of gently marketing other products or services. For example, if your webinar has covered how to create video content for Instagram, your follow-up email could point customers to your Instagram video strategy services. 

2. Make an online recording of your webinar available

Sharing an online recording allows customers who were unable to attend to still access this information. It’s also a great way to combat poor upload speed for live stream webinars, which might have stopped live attendees from enjoying the event fully. 

3. Write a blog post about the success of your webinar

Publishing a blog post about the event ties it up nicely and can be the piece of content you need to get attendees interested in your next webinar. 

Try to link the content of your webinar blog post to your products or services. For example, if you offer small business call center solutions, you might equate the success of your webinar to how you were able to meet with small business owners and talk to them about their needs. 

Conclusion

Webinars are a popular method of sharing specialist knowledge with interested parties and building your customer base. However, for them to achieve these aims, you must market them effectively. Only then will they help grow your follower base and establish your business as a thought leader in its industry. 

About the author: Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered inbound contact center and cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Here is her LinkedIn.