Marketing Webinars to Attract Attention
If you’re looking for a fruitful way to showcase the expertise behind your business, look no further than webinars.
Encouraging your audience to sign up for webinars is a mutually beneficial experience. They gain knowledge from your team’s expertise, and you promote your business.
Webinars aren’t new, but they’ve gained popularity in recent years. Let us show you how marketing webinars to suit your audience can boost attendance and maximize attention for your business.
Benefits of Hosting a Webinar
About 85-90% of businesses use webinars as a form of education and marketing, depending on the statistic you look at. Regardless of the exact percentage, these numbers show that webinars are still effective.
Webinars take some forethought, planning, and promotion, but they are worth the effort for the organizations that host them. About 55% of people who attend a webinar convert to customers, and the events tend to garner hundreds of leads for the hosting organization.
Other benefits of webinars are:
- Branding and Awareness. Hosting webinars helps increase brand visibility and can position an organization as forward-thinking and up-to-date.
- Engagement and Interaction. Webinars foster meaningful interactions with your audience. They provide an opportunity to build relationships, which ultimately results in trust. It’s not always possible to have face-to-face exchanges with all of your audience, so webinars are a great alternative.
- Authority. Webinars can establish your brand as an industry authority. Sharing your expertise with an audience does wonders for your business’s reputation. Not only will your audience trust you as an industry leader, but they’ll also encourage others to.
- Reach. Unlike physical events, which are limited by geography, webinars can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, allowing you to connect with a global audience.
- Cost-Efficiency. Hosting a webinar can be less expensive than organizing a physical event. There are no venue, travel, accommodation, or physical materials costs.
- Consistency. Regularly scheduled webinars (e.g., monthly or quarterly) can provide consistent touchpoints with an audience or customer base, fostering loyalty and ongoing engagement.
Planning Effective Webinars
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – planning wisely when creating content is essential. Being meticulous may seem time-consuming when planning your webinar, but building your brand and relationships with potential customers is worth the effort. Here are some tips for planning effective webinars.
Choose the Right Topic
Selecting webinar topics that align with your target audience’s interests is a must. You wouldn’t feed dog food to a fish, so be sure to feed your audience with relevant information that helps them. Many content-related “things” are optional, but choosing the right topic isn’t one of them.
Set Clear Goals
This step is where your planning skills come in. Each webinar you host should have a specific goal. Define the goal before you ever schedule the webinar and tweak it as necessary.
Setting a clear goal helps guide your webinar process. It also gives your audience a clear picture of what they’re registering for.
Creating Compelling Content
Not only do you have to plan webinar content, you have to craft content that resonates with the audience. Piquing their interest isn’t enough. You have to keep it!
Generate unique ideas that stick with your audience long after your webinars end. Not sure how to make your webinar memorable? Don’t just use data. Add your voice. Let your distinctive take on a topic be what keeps them engaged and coming back for more.
Marketing Webinars to Drive Registrations
Now, let’s discuss how to entice people to sign up for your webinar. It’s not enough to plan every detail if no one attends the main event. That’s a facepalm moment that no business owner wants to experience.
Launch a Registration Page
You want a landing page for your webinar, not just a promotional blog post. Create a stand-alone page registration that’s eye-catching and easy to follow. Your call to action should be displayed clearly because it’s the most critical aspect of the page. Any sort of confusion or muddled information will turn people away, so take the registration page seriously and make it short and easy to understand.
Use Social Media
Leverage social media platforms to promote webinars. Every social media platform offers the opportunity to promote your event differently.
Video content, event countdowns, and consistent reminders are a few things you can post to get attention and build excitement.
You can also share your event registration page on socials to gain awareness for the event.
The possibilities are endless on social media, so get creative!
Send Email Blasts
Emails allow you to reach your audience directly and feel more personal than social media. Perhaps that’s why more than half of webinar registrations come from emails.
Your audience members have provided their email addresses, so in return, you can send out event reminders. You can also send the registration forms directly. Include an exclusive promo code for email subscribers to create urgency.
Add a Website Pop-Up
Pop-ups on your business site are a great way to bring attention to the webinar and gain registrations. They’re especially helpful for people without prior knowledge of the event but who came to your site for other reasons. Pop-ups are a prime example of interest turning into a lead.
Consider Collaborations and Partnerships
These days, it’s invaluable to partner with influencers or complementary brands for co-hosted webinars. It’s a way to get attention from your target audience and theirs, which is double the impact. By featuring one another, both brands increase their reach and potential exposure.
Designing Engaging Webinar Experiences
Webinars are for people to learn from an expert in an exclusive environment about an in-depth subject. Whether it’s structured like a presentation, workshop, lecture, class, seminar, or training, your webinar should be engaging. Consider including some of these components in your webinar.
Interactive Elements
Various interactive tools like polls, Q&A sessions, and live chats can elevate your webinar. Interacting with your audience builds relationships and trust while enhancing attention. Webinar interactions are the closest to an in-person conversation you’ll ever have with some of your clients.
Visual Storytelling
Visuals such as photos, graphics, and videos can enhance the storytelling aspect of webinars. Visual storytelling keeps your audience focused and breaks up your talking points. Visuals also provide a condensed representation of what you’re speaking about. As a bonus, they appeal to different types of learners.
Audience Engagement Tactics
Encourage attendees to comment in the live chat to maintain audience engagement throughout the webinar. You can do this by asking everyone to drop a thumbs-up emoji in the chat if they agree with your talking point or a thumbs-down if they disagree. This activity can spark further conversations and keep them focused.
Marketing the Webinar After the Fact
It’s necessary to send your attendees a “thank you” soon after your webinar concludes. In addition to your thanks, provide them with a token from their experience or a reminder for future events.
Send Follow-Up Emails
Feel free to send post-webinar emails with valuable content. This content can include educational links that were referenced, names of other industry experts, book titles, important notes, and more. Be sure to thank your attendees and ensure them that you value their time.
Provide Webinar Recordings
Providing webinar recordings can extend the reach and impact of the content. A recording is crucial for someone who may have missed the live event. Webinars receive almost half of their views within 10 days of the original event. Even if you require payment for the recording, at least it’s available to an even larger audience.
Remember to keep SEO in mind if you upload recordings to YouTube or other video platforms. You can also share recordings on social media, even if they’re just snippets that provide a link to the full video elsewhere.
Nurture Leads
A successful webinar will likely produce leads… and that’s precisely what you want to happen! You can nurture leads generated from the webinar through tailored content, like email campaigns. Create content that meets those leads where they are and encourages them to follow through with supporting your business.
Create a Blog Post
Post-webinar blog posts are a useful recap. You can use content from the webinar transcript and embed videos in the post. It’s yet another way for people to experience your event if they missed it.
Measuring Webinar Success
After your webinar is complete, it’s study time! Our version of study time is exploring the attendance and engagement metrics of your event. This research will help you know what to do and what not to do next time.
You can also investigate your conversion tracking. This number means you measure the impact of your webinar on lead conversion. You can track this by taking sign-ups for a trial or free sample. Then, you can track the efficacy of your offer by how many people take advantage of it.
Lastly, to properly measure webinar success, accept attendee feedback. Send out an email or text survey to gather opinions from your audience. Constructive criticism sparks new ideas for the future while telling you exactly where to improve.
Market Your Webinar with Content Journey’s Help
Webinars have the power to magnify your team’s expertise and gain new supporters for your business. And the research shows that webinar attendees frequently become loyal customers. If you’re struggling with where to begin planning or marketing a webinar, book a call. We can help with marketing webinars for your business.
