Crealanta Magazine

Webinar marketing: A step-by-step guide to channel-specific promotions that work

Apr 13, 2022

In this guide, we'll talk about successfully advertising a webinar with strategic content planning as well as diversifying the channels for promotion, and executing the event with ease so that it can be engaging for your viewers and encourage registrations.

How to promote a webinar:

How to promote a webinar

After you've got a general overview of webinar marketing best practices, now let's get into strategy, project management, and other channels that generate demand for marketers utilize to ensure webinars and other events are reaching those who need them.

1. Define your audience

In the beginning, you'll need to better understand your target market or persona. Are you targeting small business proprietors? More large organizations? Customers who are currently customers?

Make sure you are specific in determining your audience's scope and strive to prioritize quality over the quantity. While broadening your audience may help attract more registrations, it may negatively impact your company in the future if the registrations are not your target group.

If you're a demand-generation or B2B marketing professional, think about how similar your webinar's audience is to your company's target viewers. You can create your target personsas or the target audience based on specific parameters like company size, industry or function, among others. It is possible to set your requirements based on your product and your brand. Narrowing down your target audience can help you figure out the best place to invest your marketing dollars.

2. Identify your goals

When planning out your webinar promotion It is always helpful to look backwards towards the business objective. Take time to map important performance indicators such as target webinar registrations, attendees as well as engagement and any sales activities that are attributed to your event.

When you align your promotional plan with your company's goals it's more likely that you'll drive a bigger effect.

3. Factor in SEO

A little SEO research can go a long way to make sure you're optimizing your content your content for the search. Take the time to explore the keywords and phrases that are most relevant to your content. It will pay dividends big time as you increase the quality of natural traffic to your webinar landing page.

4. Create a compelling registration page

Most of the time, when someone is directed to an event webpage filled with great design, an intuitive process for registration, and a snappy text that meets their requirements They're more likely become excited and sign up.

This is a great occasion. Offer essential information to prospective registrants and make them be enticed to sign up. Make sure to highlight key speakers, exciting subjects, as well as fun programs. The guest's enthusiasm will naturally carry them towards registration. Beware of roadblocks of all kinds. Facilitate registration to understand and be completed.

5. Find great speakers

6. Choose the best day and time to live

As a general guideline, do not go on Fridays, Mondays and holidays. You should aim for a late breakfast or lunchtime for live broadcasts. This will avoid conflicts between the two American coasts as well as being early enough for Europe to view in the evening.

A webinar shouldn't last greater than one hour. It should have enough time to cover the topic however, not enough duration that the audience's attention span wane. Don't forget that the total duration of the session should also include questions and answers. A moderated Q&A can run until the participants start seeking answers, so be sure to allow enough time for questions at the end of the webinar.

7. Create a clear and strategic timeline for your promotional campaign and decide on your preferred channels

Make sure to advertise your event everywhere you can . You could also use your historical channel statistics to determine which channels will drive the largest number of registrants.

For example, if most webinar registrations originate from mailer promotions, then plan to send out a string of emails targeted at the audience you want to reach. If you observe higher registrations from paid social ads or organic social advertisements, be sure to incorporate a strong social campaign. It's the good idea to use different channels to promote your campaigns and retarget non-registrants (from the ideal target market) wherever and whenever possible.

We at e-Learning like to advertise webinars via email marketing, paid social ads and organic social media posts. Additionally, we use promotions in our products in conjunction with speaker promotional events, as well as employees' advocacy.

The sky is the limit! Try experimenting with a couple of channels and observe their performance as time passes to determine what channels should be prioritized so that the registrations or raise awareness.

8. Make a concise

When you've got a complete knowledge of your audience as well as your business objectives and promotional channels - plan to draft a brief. A brief is a written document which contains information such as the lead of the project, details of contact, the webinar objective, concept, and the key KPIs.

The brief can be as detailed or as high-level as you'd like. It can also help keep cross-functional teams or stakeholders in line with the presentation and the goals you're trying to achieve.

Pro Tip:Depending on the complexity of your venture, you may require separate briefs that include one to cover the entire project, one for your team of creatives, another for your landing/registration page, and one for your emails or other promotional material.

9. Prepare text, design assets and track links for every marketing channel

Assets need to be created according to the channel. Copy for email, for instance, is completely different from social content. In order to begin preparing your promotions You'll need to define the various channels for promotion. After that, you'll need to work together with your team members to improve copy, design assets, and develop tracks to every.

Email copy, which assumes that the recipient is largely opting-in, should be to-the-point and clear. A person who receives emails knows your brand and the expectations they can be expecting from your emails. So, make sure to modify your email content to take advantage of this experience and be focused on the value of your webinar - what value can your webinar give to someone likely versed in the space?

Social content needs to catch the attention of your audience with less space than email copy. Your audience on social networks might not be as familiar with your brand and needs to be encouraged to put down their scrolls. Tailor your social media copy to suit your audience and set a warm style with great images or video.

Regardless of the channel be sure that your tracking link are set up to account for various attribution channels. Use different tracking links or track requests for email, social, as well as other channels.

Get creative! It is important to create promotions that are relevant for audiences that engage on every channel.

10. Launch your promotions

In planning the webinar's promotion you must strike a balance between promoting at a time that will maximize the amount of people who sign up, while also being cognizant of not making announcements too long before the time people realize when they registered at all.

The best guideline is to commence webinar marketing at least three weeks from the day of go live giving more time for bigger-scale virtual occasions.

At , the team usually begins promoting by launching the landing page, initial email, and paid social. Organic social promotion typically launches prior to the day of the event to create a sense of urgency.

After that, we'll hold off for a week and a half to two weeks before pushing an email with the second promotional message. A last minute social post in advance of the event could be helpful for last minute registrations.

11. Stagger your email campaigns

Emails are a great inexpensive way to connect with the masses and encourage registrations. To make your campaign more effective, make sure to schedule your emails to be distributed in a staggered manner. No one likes to be overwhelmed by multiple messages from the same sender or brand.

Take note of different email marketing campaigns, or automated cadences such as reminders being sent out by different departments of your business. Inquire with your operations team, CRM, or campaigns teams to be sure your emails for promotion are compatible to your general email calendar.

The exact date and time at which you'll send your emails matters as well. Be sure to take your reader's preferences regarding email into account prior to sending your email campaign. For instance, the enterprise audience may be more likely to not open emails on either on a Monday or Friday afternoon. Others may be more inclined to open emails in different days and times.

Pro tip: Take a look back at your success metrics in all your organic social, paid social email, and other channel campaigns to determine whether there are specific periods or days when your campaigns do better. Utilize these findings as a base and then continue to refine your strategy.

12. Include variations in your paid ads

If you are planning to use paid social, consider running ads throughout the entire duration of the promotion. Launch your campaign as soon when you have the necessary assets including copy and design. It's difficult to determine what time people will be viewing your advertisements, which is why it's helpful to run ads for as long as is possible to cover your bases.

In addition to a longer promotional period for paid ads, it is also important to plan for variations in your social media ads paid for. This includes both creative and variants on copy.

Without variations in your promotional ads, you run the risk of having your audience getting the same ad over and over again If you're not able to provide a few variations, you'll likely hit frequency caps on the social networks. Innovative variations in the creative of your campaign will help them keep their shelf-life longer ensure that the audience gets access to the same ad multiple times.

13. Make use of organic social to increase publicity and to encourage last minute registrations

While organic social engagement likely isn't going to drive the majority of registrations, it will likely capture some last-minute registrants who otherwise might have missed out. It's also great for building generalized exposure and awareness.

Although you must plan your promotions a few weeks prior to the event but you shouldn't launch your organic social campaigns prior to the event. A regular webinar with a few guests and an hour long session is likely to only require three - four weeks to promote. However, a cornerstone online event might need some advance notice However, normal webinars will be better served by a compelling blog post 2 weeks in advance and a last minute reminder for any stragglers.

14. Focus on the user experience when you are considering products or onsite promotions

If your software allows it, in-product promotions like pop-ups or banners is other options to take into consideration in marketing your webinar. In-product promotions are generally most effective when they're on the side of helpful and subtle rather than urgent or too intrusive. Make sure you check with the other teams to make sure any in-product promotions do not adversely impact user experience or clash with other marketing or the goals of your product.

15. Make sure your speakers are tuned into the happening

Work with your presenters to generate more awareness about your webinar as well as the its. You can explore paid ways to boost your webinar's visibility. The promotion in a speaker's branding's newsletter, a post on their Facebook page or even a backlink from a pertinent piece of content can create publicity for the conference.

16. Employ employee-led advocacy to encourage your team to promote day-of

Similar to speakers, your coworkers are adept at spreading buzz via both the power of word-of-mouth as well as via their social networks.

Create a small amount of employee involvement by creating a short social content. Drop it in an email or Slack channel so your team can easily copy and paste, send it to their contacts, or share it on Linkedin them.

The best way to engage employees is to get them engaged no longer than 48 hours before the date This makes this promotional strategy great for some last minute registrations.

 Originally written in the first place by Alysha Parker on the 15th of September 2021. Updated by Carine Alexis on December 17 2021.