5 Ways to Promote a Webinar and Increase Webinar Attendance

Make Sure Your Live Event is a Success with These Webinar Promotion Tips

Webinars are an excellent way to establish authority, engage your audience, and grow your mailing list—but just because you “build” it doesn’t mean anyone will come. Although it’s important to spend time thinking about a subject people are interested in and practicing your presentation, none of your efforts will pay off if no one sees it. That’s why you need to spend as much time thinking about ways to promote your webinar as you do about the presentation itself.

When Should You Start Promoting a Webinar?

Before we look at ways to generate buzz and drive attendance, let’s start with an important and often overlooked aspect of webinar promotion: timing. Ideally, you should begin promoting your webinar as soon as the landing page is complete (more on that later) and at least three weeks before the event.

According to the 2017 Webinar Benchmarks Report by ON24, which examined more than 16,000 webinars from over 1,000 organizations ranging from SMBs to large enterprises, one in four registrants sign up more than 15 days before the event.

A longer promotional cycle allows you to extend social promotion and plan a series of email drops over several weeks to drive a larger audience to your webinar. People may also be more likely to sign up for a webinar  a couple weeks before the event while their calendars are still free—and even if something comes up and they don’t attend, at least you’ve already captured their email address and can start nurturing them as a potential lead.

The 2017 Webinar Benchmarks Report also provides insights on the best time to schedule a webinar for optimal attendance: aim for the middle of the week, when people are focused on work and productivity.

How to Drive Attendance to Your Webinar

You can probably come up with dozens of creative ways to promote a webinar, but before you start thinking too far outside the box make sure you have the basics covered. Below are five things you should do if you want to have a successful webinar:

Design a great landing page

The first and most important step is to build an optimized landing page for the event. This page is exclusively used for promoting the webinar, including an overview of the topic and information about the presenters. The landing page will also contain a sign-up form where interested attendees provide information (name, email, job title, company size, etc.) in exchange for access to the live webinar.

When designing and writing copy for the landing page, think about the five W’s:

• Who? Introduce presenters, with brief bios that explain their background, experience, and why they were chosen to talk about this particular subject.
• What? Explain what the webinar is about and provide some examples of the topics it will cover. Bullet points work best for quickly conveying the main ideas.
• When? Make it clear when the event is. Provide the date and time so people can put it on their calendars and plan to
• Where? Explain where the webinar will be held (online, obviously, but which platform or website will attendees need to visit?) and how it will be accessible.
• Why? Most importantly, clearly explain the value proposition of your webinar. How will someone benefit from attending your webinar? What will the takeaway be? What will their personal benefit be?

Check out 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips from Unbounce for help designing a landing page that converts and drives attendance to your webinar.

Promote on your website

Use top bars, pop-ups, and different forms of banners and display ads to promote your webinar to the traffic already coming to your website, especially on the pages that are closely related to the topic. Because “real estate” is limited on these type of banners and ads, you’ll have to think of a brief call to action that quickly conveys the value proposition. Each click should take users to the landing page, where they can learn more about the webinar and sign up to attend.

Leverage guest presenters

Adding a well-known and knowledgeable guest presenter can help drive even more attendance to your webinar, especially if your guest promotes the event to his or her followers. This is a win-win for both parties: you get free advertising, and your guest gets to demonstrate his or her thought leadership on the subject matter. MeetingBurner offers some tips on how to recruit an influential guest presenter for your next webinar.

Encourage employee social sharing

According to SocialChorus, 77 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product when they hear about it from someone they know and trust. The same idea applies to webinars.

To gain an even wider audience, encourage your employees to share the webinar with their friends and followers. The key is to make it as easy as possible for them. Craft three or four suggested tweets or posts about the webinar and send out to your staff along with an overview of the webinar and why it’s important to get as many attendees as possible.

Incentivize event sign-up

Even if you have a great webinar planned, you may need to offer a little bit more in exchange to get someone to sign up. For example, offer attendees a coupon code (provided at the end of the webinar) or enter registrants into a prize drawing. Whatever the incentive, make sure it’s clearly conveyed on the landing page, website banners, and in promotional tweets and posts.

Get Help from the Event Registration Professionals

Contact Intelemark if you want to drive even more people to your webinar. Our expertise in outbound calling enables us to drive attendance to your event, and after the event we can follow up and help you turn those prospects into clients or customers. Let us show you how a customized event registration and follow-up campaign can drive outstanding results for your company.