How to Host & Promote a Webinar Successfully: Part 2

“You can’t sell anything, if you can’t tell anything”
– Beth Comstock

In Part 1 of this blog series, we shared the best practices on developing content, analyzing the right schedule and promoting a webinar on the website and blog. However, a good strategy won’t do much if your marketing efforts are not targeted to capture the interests of a wider audience.

Through this post, we are sharing our experience on promoting a webinar to a global audience via social media, guest speakers, email marketing, and more… Read through for details.

1) Email Marketing for the Webinar

A recent survey by Unbounce revealed that nearly 70% of webinar registrations are received via invitation email. But with every business trying to vie for attention, how do you make your webinar invitation standout? In order to get prospects to sign up for your webinar, you need to work on your email marketing strategy.

Let’s take a look at some of the different types of emails that you can leverage for your campaign:

• • The Registration Email: The invite email for registration is your chance at driving maximum conversion. Here is the registration email we created for our webinar ‘Lightning Communities Demystified’.

There are three prime areas to focus on: subject line, body copy, and call to action. The subject line defines what the webinar is all about in one simple catchy line; the body copy focuses on benefits of attending the webinar, and CTA is added to direct users to take an action, like registering for the webinar.

• • The Thank You Email: After successful registration, a thank you email is sent to the registrant. There is a higher chance of conversion from registrants, thus, sending an email adds value to your campaign. To exceed their expectations, it is advisable to go ahead with pitching a good offer.

• The Second Email: If a prospect did not register after receiving registration invite email, then it is a good practice to forward another email (on the lines of “it is your chance to experience the best in…” or “are you missing out on an amazing opportunity to…”).
• The Reminder Email: Final reminder emails are sent to create an urgency for reserving a spot in the webinar and boost the count of registrants. This is again a good practice to bring your webinar to the forefront.

Quick Tip: A mistake can spoil the essence of a marketing campaign, so never forget to cross-check your email to ensure that there are no broken links or typos.

2) Leveraging Social Media

Invest in the power of social media to remind your audience about the upcoming webinar. There are abundant opportunities to leverage the best out of social media.

Promoting on Twitter:

• Make sure you pick a dedicated hashtag for your webinar and include it on the landing page, in emails, and everywhere else to engage with the community.
• A potential registrant receives notifications for thousands of tweets in a day. Attaching an image to a tweet makes it standout.
• Do not overwhelm your audience by tweeting excessively. Instead, distribute tweets over the course of the day.

Here is a great reference tweet that we created for our webinar:

Quick Tip: When tweeting, analyze a pattern of the times of the day when your followers are most active on Twitter.

Promoting on LinkedIn:

• Promote your webinar in closed LinkedIn groups in a way that it resonates with the content being shared in those groups.
• Add the webinar to your company’s LinkedIn page to position it as a company-wide initiative.
• Encourage your connections to spread awareness about the webinar, prior to the scheduled event.

Quick Tip: Are your speakers leveraging their connections? If not, then you should work towards benefiting from their email lists and social circle to reach out to a more authentic audience that has a wider scope of conversion.

3) Continuing Lead Generation after the Webinar

Following up with prospects after the conclusion of webinar is an excellent way to drive lead generation. After the webinar, your landing page turns into a lead generation page to provide access to the recording page. Two commonly practiced strategies for lead generation post-webinar include:

• Building a ‘Recording’ Landing Page: Design a landing page with your webinar recording on it. This page will include the title and the description of the webinar, video recording and a proper CTA linking to the ‘offer’ landing page. This page serves two important sections of the audience – the webinar registrants/attendees and those who request the webinar recording later. There is immense lead generation potential here.

• Building an ‘Offer’ Landing Page: The offer page gives you a chance to turn those leads into customers by giving visitors additional information about related products. This page is an attempt at attracting new business prospects. When designing this page, keep a check that there is a direct link between the webinar content and the offer, so that your campaign is every bit relevant to the visitor.

This is our ultimate webinar checklist. What is your key strategy to ensure that the registrants do not forget about your upcoming webinar? Feel free to share with us!

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