8 Ways to Elevate Your Webinar Promotions

If you build it, they will come…right?  Not exactly.

One of the biggest challenges webinar hosts face is attracting an audience to the event.  We’ve put together a list of eight ways to elevate your webinar promotions that you can use for your next event to guarantee you’re attracting the right audience for your event.

Promotion Schedule

Having a promotion schedule gives you a clear path to follow over the days or weeks leading up to your webinar event.  A clearly defined schedule will help you stay on top of what and when your various marketing pieces need to go out and help you to gain insight on how many registrants and participants will show.

A few things to keep in mind when creating your schedule:

• A typical webinar promotion schedule lasts between 7-21 days.
• Best practices suggest three weeks of promotion preceding your event to allow your marketing to reach as many people as possible.

Example of a promotion schedule:

Webinar Title

Webinar titles should be catchy, appeal to the audience you want to attract and answer the question “What will I learn from attending this webinar?”

Some tips to help you create a great webinar title:

• Know your audience! Knowing who you want to target and understanding what interests them will help attract the right people to your webinar event.
• Use an action word to grab the reader’s attention, one that encourages them to sign up.
• Tell them why they should attend your webinar!

Value-building Reminder Emails

Build value into each email you send.  Each email should not only remind your registrants about the webinar’s date and time but also continue to provide value to the recipient even if he/she ultimately doesn’t end up attending.

Value-building items you can add to your emails include:

• Relevant blog posts
• Previous webinar recordings
• Freebies
• ebooks

*Make sure the piece of value-building info you include is related to your webinar topic (i.e. don’t include an ebook on social media trends for the B2B industry if your webinar’s title is “How to Publish Your Own Cookbook”).

Pre-written Social Media Tweets & Posts

When it comes to webinar promotion, social media is an amazing tool to utilize.  One easy way to get people to promote your webinar event for you is by providing pre-written tweets or posts and make them easily accessible/shareable for your registrants. You can have these tweets automatically populate or have the text accessible to copy and paste into the platform of their choosing. Click for suggestions on auto-populating social media posts.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are an excellent, cost-effective way to promote webinars.  They allow you to be very specific in your targeting, attracting people who may not necessarily know about your event but may be very interested in the topic(s) discussed during your event.

Here are a few best practices to follow when creating Facebook Ads:

• Make sure you use less than 20% text in the image of your ad. Many ads are not approved because of too much text on the ad image.
• Make sure you use a clear call to action to drive people to register for your event (“Sign up”, “Get registered”, “Start Now” are much more direct CTAs than “Welcome” or “Let’s connect”).
• Use Facebook’s amazing targeting capabilities to really hone in on your target audience (hint: look into “Lookalike Audiences” and “Custom Audiences” for some of the best targeting on the market).

Email Signatures

This is one of the simplest ways to gain interest in your webinar without spending a penny.  Add a little snippet about your webinar event and a link to sign-up in your email signature.  Set it and forget it!

Guest Post from Speaker

Speakers typically have a following of their own who would be interested in the event you’re hosting just because they know who the speaker is.  Ask the speaker to write a quick blog post about the event, what they’ll be talking about and how people can register to attend.  The speaker can share the blog post via social media channels which will drive both registration and traffic to your website!

Event-Specific Hashtags

Get people talking about your webinar event via social media with event-specific hashtags.  Encourage registrants to tweet about your event using the event-specific hashtag.  Make sure you tweet using the hashtag to give people who see the tweets a simple link to sign-up or learn more. #SuperGroovyWebinar

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Have any tips to add to the list?  Share with us in the comments below!