When it comes to promoting your webinar, the first step is to make sure you have a quality product to promote. The next part is making sure all the right people know about it and sign up. We can’t help you with the first part, but we can offer you helpful tips for the latter.
What exactly is a Webinar?
First thing's first. What exactly is a webinar? It is a web seminar or webcast designed to be educational as well as entertaining. Basically, it is a virtual seminar that replaces those boring classroom seminars that we have all suffered through. Here are six ways to make yours a knockout.
- The Topic: Start Smart
The most important thing about a webinar is to pick an interesting and relevant topic that people care about, otherwise even if they do sign up, they won’t be paying attention. You want a topic that’s broad enough to appeal to a wide audience, yet detailed enough that it provides valuable educational information for attendees. Research what your buyers are interested in and measure that against your specific strengths to develop a stellar subject.
“Think carefully about who your audience is while crafting your webinar content, because, at the end of the day, your webinar is about building connections and relationships with your audience so they trust you that much more.” (HubSpot).
- Share Social
Of course you want to promote your webinar on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but try a more strategic approach. In addition to posting on your business pages, also have your employees promote the webinar on their personal pages or any relevant groups they belong to. Why? Because people are 77 percent more likely to buy a product when they hear about it from someone they know and trust, according to SocialChorus. For consistency, craft a few suggested promotional sentences for employees to use when sharing.
- People Promote
Not only do you want your employees promoting your webinar, but you also want your speakers and presenters to tell people. If you have a killer speaker, chances are they already have a large following, so why not take advantage of their audience?! This allows you to gain exposure to a new audience who may not have known about you previously, but can become warm leads.
- Create Landing Pages
When you promote your webinar, you need to have landing pages with more information and registration details. Use the landing page to give additional details about the event, including who the presenters are, what information will be covered and what attendees can expect to learn, plus when and where it is. Just because it is virtual doesn’t mean participants don’t need time and date info to add to their calendars. If you are promoting your event in multiple places, different landing pages will let you track where interest is stemming from.
- Plan Smart
Although webinars are online, people still need to carve out time during their day to participate. And, just as there are optimal times to send promo emails, there are preferable times to host webinars or webcasts. Why does this matter? Because you are more likely to garner interest when promoting your event if it is at a desirable time.
Stats and experience suggest that the middle of the week—Tuesday through Thursday—is the best time since you avoid the Monday catchup and Friday slides into the weekend. Speaking of weekends, avoid them. As for time of day, early afternoon, post-lunch is a good time for many professionals; however, factor time zones into your planning. If your audience is across multiple time zones, plan accordingly to accommodate everyone’s schedules. Unsure of the best time? Ask people when they sign up if they have a time preference. You may be surprised with the answers.
- Blog it Out
As with everything in the land of inbound, it always comes back to content. So develop some stellar web and blog content to inform your readers about the webinar. Beyond creating a webinar-specific post, we suggest creating posts that explore the topics (or related topics) from different perspectives and link back to the webinar landing page. Content shows readers that you really know your stuff and offers them a glimpse into what they can learn.
In addition to these six musts, there are many other ways to build excitement while promoting your webinar, such as setting up calendar reminders, sending thank you and reminder emails, posting on your homepage, and more. Don’t stop at just these, take your webinar promotion to the next level by building upon these six tips.
Need more inbound guidance? Learn more about how to promote your products with this free guide.
