Why Is Webinar Promotion Important?

Webinars are an impactful way to connect with your audience, generate leads, and ultimately drive revenue. They give you a direct line to the people who are interested in what you have to say, and allow your attendees to engage your brand, ask questions, and send feedback. These are all crucial steps for building fruitful customer relationships.

However, as powerful as webinars are, they’re useless if no one shows up. Nailing your webinar promotion is mission critical to running successful webinars that further your business objectives.

Webinar Promotion Strategies and Best Practices

When it comes to webinar promotion, there aren’t many hard-and-fast rules, but there are plenty of best practices. Here are a few to help you promote your webinar and improve your registration rate.

Plan the Details in Advance

Since most webinars are live events, you should start your webinar promotion weeks in advance to accommodate your attendees’ schedules. However, before you can promote your webinar, you need to have important building blocks in place, such as your topic, speakers, and why people should show up in the first place.

That means you should plan your webinar logistics and details a month or more in advance to give yourself and your team enough time to promote the event successfully.

Launch Your Registration Page Once Your Dates and Speakers Are Confirmed

Sometimes referred to as a webinar landing page, it’s important to set up your registration page early so that anyone who wants to RSVP for your webinar can do so. A registration page is necessary to promote your webinar on social media, email, and any other channel.

Another benefit of launching your registration page early is it forces you to write a description and call to action. This information helps to focus the rest of your webinar promotions.

Your registration page should be optimized for conversion with a clear and actionable CTA. There’s no point in driving anyone to your landing page if they won’t convert. It should also have social share buttons so registrants can spread the word to their networks as well.

Once your page is in place, you can capture organic leads, link to it in relevant blog posts, broadcast it to your partners, and advertise it on any other platforms you prefer.

Identify Impactful Channels To Promote on

Once your details and registration page are set, be strategic about which channels you want to leverage. Each channel has different levels of priority depending on your target audience and whether they are current customers, middle-of-funnel leads, or people who may not have heard of you before. Your promotion channels should always follow where your target audience is located. Promote your event where your audience spends their time.

You can spotlight your webinar on social media, your email newsletters, paid ads, partners, your blog, or even your email signature. Social media and your own website are some of the more popular channels we’ll cover below. But don’t be afraid to get creative!

Don’t Forget Your Existing Customers

Just because you already acquired your existing customers doesn’t mean you should forget about them. If you’re hosting a webinar that’s useful for your potential customers, it may be informative for your current customers as well.

Well-targeted, educational webinars can help you improve customer retention and increase lifetime value. Not only that, you could turn unhappy customers into vocal advocates for your brand.

To share a webinar with your existing customers, look at the places where they interact with your company. You can add a banner to your website that invites them to your event, or place an in-app pop-up to drive registrants from your customer base.

You can also have your customer-facing teams add a promo for the webinar into their email signatures. Additionally, train your sales or customer service team to stay on top of the company webinar schedule, and remain conscious of anyone they speak to who might find the webinar useful.

Webinar Promotion On Social Media

Social media is one of the first places to start your webinar promotion. Social posts have a short lifespan, with multiple companies vying for attention on your followers’ feeds, so it’s important to establish yourself here early and uniquely.

Look at the different groups your target audience is part of and the influencers they follow. Consider reaching out to relevant personalities and asking them to re-share your event posts, or to sponsor a post directly from the influencer.

You can also use paid social media ads to reach your target audience on various networks. The most popular networks for webinar promotion are LinkedIn and Facebook, depending on your topic and audience. You can retarget your website visitors or audiences from past events to reach interested leads. Don’t forget to test different ad creatives to see which performs best.

Utilize the unique features on each platform. LinkedIn, for example, allows you to collect registrants with native registration forms. Similarly, Facebook allows you to create online events that make it easy for your audience to click through and register.

Lastly, you can leverage 1:1 invitations on Facebook and LinkedIn to invite your audience directly. Just make sure your event is relevant to them; this will increase your chances of registrations and conversions. If the topic isn’t of value, your audience won’t register (regardless of promotional tactics).

Let’s dive into those two channels in greater depth.

Webinar Promotion On LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an excellent channel to reach your professional contacts, making it an ideal place to post about a B2B webinar and have it shared among your network. Create different types of LinkedIn content centered around your webinar.

For example:

• Record a short video about your webinar and upload it natively to LinkedIn.
• Create a custom hashtag for your webinar series or event, and attach it to your LinkedIn posts.
• Update your company’s cover image to promote your webinar. Include your title, date, time, speakers, and registration page URL. Ask your employees if they would consider updating their cover photos as well.
• Create a LinkedIn event that shares the details of your webinar. This makes it easier to share natively on the platform.

When you create a LinkedIn event for your webinar, you can invite individual connections like friends and colleagues, and share the event link in groups. LinkedIn also allows you to use native lead forms to collect registrant information directly from your event page.

You may want to consider sponsoring your updates about the event, or using a LinkedIn event ad. Like your LinkedIn event, when using LinkedIn ads, you can use lead forms to collect registrations via forms pre-filled with a viewer’s contact info. This makes it easier for people to register, particularly on mobile. Just include your webinar CTA on an ad and allow interested parties to register with a few taps.

Webinar Promotion On Facebook

Facebook is a more casual social network than LinkedIn, with most people’s connections being their friends, family, and casual acquaintances. Whereas LinkedIn is great to reach niche B2B audiences, Facebook is excellent for B2C or more generalized B2B audiences.

Similar to LinkedIn, you need different types of assets to help you share your event on Facebook. Try sharing different styles of images, replacing your cover image with a webinar teaser, and using hashtags for your event.

Facebook also works hand in hand with Instagram, which makes it easy to use the same creative across the two networks. Utilize the features that make each platform unique, such as stories, for best results.

You can set up a Facebook event on your page so it stands out when visitors view your company page. This gives it a longer lifespan than a post, which can quickly get buried under other updates. You can also use your Facebook event information to power future event ads by targeting anyone who responded to that particular event.

Finally, you can invest some ad spend to test out sponsored content. Dynamic ads are a powerful tool for A/B testing multiple copy and creative combinations to see which resonates well with your target audience and generates the most sign-ups.

Pro-tip: Remember to resize your media assets for the different platforms and placements.

Webinar Promotion Over Email

You can promote your webinar via email in a few ways. The most popular is by sharing your upcoming webinar in your company newsletter. For this, you should identify the right audience segments who will find your webinar valuable. Remember to keep your subject line and preview text short and to the point.

Another way to promote a webinar is through cold outreach. If you’ve identified someone who might find your webinar interesting (perhaps an ideal client you’d love to get your foot in the door with), then you may want to send a quick, personalized email invitation. For this type of cold email outreach, you should keep things as simple as possible. Don’t include any images or attachments, and stick to one actionable CTA driving to your webinar.

In every email, always include the date and time, and use your email signature to foster strong brand recall. Additionally, you can add an image banner to your email signature to create free impressions in your everyday messages!

One final method is by using sponsored emails or asking a partner company to share your upcoming webinar in their newsletters. We’ll talk more about this later.

Pro-tip: LinkedIn event banners are perfectly sized to be repurposed for your email signature banner.

Webinar Promotion On Communities and Services

An increasingly popular tactic is leveraging communities and services to promote your webinar. You can check communities on Reddit or join dedicated Slack groups to share your event.

Some marketing agencies offer webinar promotion services, and you can list your event on aggregator websites to reach individuals searching for events by topic.

For example, Banzai provides services to drive webinar registrants. You can add your event to Banzai, create your audience profile, and then launch targeted outreach through their platform, Reach (Demio is a Banzai company, by the way).

Another avenue to promote your events is through industry publications. Many websites, newsletters, and other popular information channels within your industry can share your event on your behalf. Some of these are free (for example, if you partner with a company to host your webinar), while others are paid (such as a sponsored newsletter).

Webinar Promotion With Partnerships

Speaking of partnerships — combining forces with another company to put on a joint webinar is a great way to widen your reach, bolster your content, and add credibility to your event. You can do this by inviting another company to speak at your webinar, join a panel discussion, or contribute to the slide deck.

By doing this, you tap into your partners’ marketing network and add it to yours, doubling or tripling your reach. You can ask the companies of other speakers to share the event on their social networks, newsletters, and even their website.

Incorporate Videos Into Your Webinar Promotions

Video is a powerful promotional tool, particularly for webinars. Since they follow the same delivery format, video can provide a glimpse into what the actual webinar will look and feel like. You don’t get the same type of preview in a blog teaser or social media post, for example.

A video is versatile when it comes to marketing: it can be used in ads, on landing pages, in social media, or even sent as a link in an SMS. Plus, your audience loves video and takes action more often when one is employed. Videos on social media generate 1,200% more shares than text and image content combined.

To create a video that promotes your webinar and gets people to sign up, start with your topic and the transformation you expect your attendees to go through during your webinar. What will they learn? What will they take away from your event?

You can record yourself giving a quick introduction and sharing how your webinar will help attendees move closer to wherever they want to be. That could mean the next step in their career, the start of a healthier routine, or anything else. You could also do a teaser and, if your webinar is pre-recorded, take a clip of one of the most interesting points in your webinar. Or, you can even create an animated video with text and graphics that share what your webinar will cover.

Once you decide on a video style, pay attention to the production details. Sound quality, image resolution, transition timing, and CTA’s all affect the overall quality and feel of your video.

Triple-check that your video drives viewers back to your landing page in as many places as possible. Have you added the link to the bottom of the screen? Did you call it out during the video? Is there an overlaid link in the video? With a high-quality video ready to use, it’s time to move on to distribution.

Share the video in your email newsletter, on your landing page, uploaded natively to your social media channels, and even in your paid ad campaigns. Put it anywhere your target audience might see it, and make it clear it’s media they can interact with to encourage them to hit play.

Optimize Your Webinar Landing Page

A webinar landing page (also called a registration page since it’s the URL where a person can register) needs to strike a good balance between being visually appealing and easy to use. It must clearly identify why a visitor should register, and make it as quick as possible to sign up.

A well-converting webinar landing page consists of a few key elements:

• A compelling headline and description that follows SEO best practices.
• A clear reason someone should sign up to attend.
• A simple registration form.
• Important information like dates and times above the fold.
• A focus on your target audience.

All the content on your landing page should center around your audience and what the event can do for them. You may even consider adding a quick video teaser (or the videos we discussed earlier) to explain this further.

If you believe you’ve done all of the above and are still seeing low conversion rates from visitors to registrants, you might want to install scroll maps. These will show you how far your average visitor scrolls down the page so you can make sure to put the important information and registration form above that point.

Heat maps can also reveal if any of your CTA buttons are confusing, whether or not visitors think an image or text is actually hyperlinked, and which sections of your landing page are most interesting to visitors.

Webinar Promotion Timeline

Six to eight weeks before your target event date, start thinking about your webinar goal, KPIs, and audience. Those will help you decide what topic to cover, ideally something your audience cares about that you can help with.

Once you decide on a topic, ready your landing page and the details of your webinar four weeks before the event. This includes the title, description, speakers, and outline of what attendees will learn. Although certain types of promotion can be deployed closer to the event, start partner outreach immediately after launching your landing page. This will ensure your partners have ample time to include promotion in their planning.

During the three weeks leading up to the event, you’ll want to schedule social media posts once or twice a week, and include the webinar in your email announcements weekly. You can also do a final reminder the day before, utilizing urgency in your messaging (ex. “Join us in less than 24 hours to learn …”).

One sample timeline you might follow for a webinar is:

• Six to eight weeks out: Finalize topic.
• Four weeks out: Push landing page, banner on website. Begin partner outreach.
• Two weeks out: Begin social media promotion.
• One week before: Share your webinar with relevant communities and event aggregator services.
• Weekly: A plug in your regular email newsletters.
• Bi-weekly: Social media pushes.
• The day before: Email reminders.
• On-going: Paid ads, CTA in your company’s email signatures.