If you’re using webinars to promote your brand, you might be feeling like you’re trapped in a paradox. How can you market your marketing tool? We’ve put together a list of twenty creative ways to get more people to sign up and attend your webinar. Whether you’re trying to create high-quality leads, promote brand awareness, educate your customers about your products, or something else entirely, using some of these ideas will help you boost registrants for your next event.
In 2020, 67% of marketers said they were increasing their investment in webinars. Why, you ask? Two of the primary reasons are that they’re cost-effective and create high-quality leads.
If you’re using webinars to promote your brand, though, you might be feeling like you’re trapped in a paradox.
How can you market your marketing tool?
Never fear. We’ve put together a list of twenty creative ways to get more people to sign up and attend your webinar. Whether you’re trying to create high-quality leads, promote brand awareness, educate your customers about your products, or something else entirely, using some of these ideas will help you boost registrants for your next event.
Maybe this seems obvious, but sometimes it’s easy to overlook the thing that’s right in front of our noses. No matter how awesome your company is, how cool your team is, and how much effort you put into creating and marketing your webinar, you’re going to struggle to get the signups and attendance you want if the topic doesn’t appeal to a wide enough audience.
At the same time, if your topic is too vague, people probably won’t feel like your webinar is offering anything particularly special and will pass up on signing up.
Are you struggling to figure out the precise topic for your webinar? Start brainstorming by looking at events offered by your competitors, doing keyword research, and even asking the community you’ve built around your brand what they would be most interested in seeing in a webinar from your team.
Are you organizing a webinar for the first time? Don’t worry; we’ve got your back. Check out our ultimate guide to planning a webinar to make sure your first event goes smoothly.
Once you’ve got a bombproof topic that’s sure to interest a big chunk of your target audience, you’ll want to employ additional marketing techniques. One really effective way to create urgency around your webinar signup is to have a countdown timer.
The reason this is such a great tool is two-fold. On the one hand, hardly anyone can resist feeling a little pressured when there’s a countdown timer, which (gently) pushes them to act in instances when they might otherwise delay until it’s too late to sign up. Secondly, it helps to solidify your webinar as an actual event that is happening in real-time– which will make them think about their calendar and whether they’d like to put your event on it right away.
There’s a reason why marketers are so into email marketing: it’s super effective. When you want to boost signups and attendance for your webinar, this is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal.
According to some stats, email marketing can be responsible for up to 57% of your registration success.
You can create countless types of content to help spread the word about your new webinar. Consider starting a content marketing campaign in the weeks leading up to your event, complete with blogs, videos, and social media posts, so you can reach the largest possible audience.
One of the best ways to get the people already on board your ship to invite others to join is a referral program of some sort. You shouldn’t be shy about asking people who have already signed up to invite others they think would enjoy the event.
There are lots of different types of incentives you could include– and you could choose to reward people simply by passing the info along or only if the people they send the referral link to sign up or attend.
Ok, ok, so it might not be the most creative way to improve your webinar signup and attendance. That being said, listing your event on websites like Eventbrite, Facebook Events, and GoToStage can be particularly effective, so it would be a disservice not to at least mention it.
Your registration page can make or break your webinar event. Think about it– this is what your audience is looking at when they are making the final decision over whether they will actually sign up.
An ineffective or complicated registration page could be enough to leave people who would happily attend your event instead bouncing off completely. Make sure you utilize SEO, have lightning-fast page loading times, and have a mobile-friendly registration page.
Here at PizzaTime, we have to admit that we’ve always got pizza on the brain. In reality, though, who doesn’t?
One creative, fun, and delicious way to boost your signups and attendance is to offer pizza to the first, say, ten or twenty people who sign up. Depending on the size of your budget and the size of your business, you could even run a much larger promotional offer than that.
When you’re putting on a webinar, it’s important to respect that people are considering taking their precious time to attend your event. They will inevitably have questions about logistics, the topic, and more. Make sure that you have an easy way for people to communicate with you– whether it be through offering an email address, a chat service, or a dedicated section of your customer service department.
One great way to get everyone psyched for your webinar is to help everyone understand just how awesome the presenters you have booked are. Ask the presenters if they are willing to have you publish articles or videos they’ve made on your site and social media pages. They’ll likely be glad to– after all; they want to boost signups and attendance too!
Do you offer memberships to your brand? If so, show your members how much you appreciate them by giving them the chance to attend at a discount.
Who doesn’t love free stuff? You might consider giving every attendant some swag or just the first certain number of registrants. Either way, there’s nothing quite as incentivizing as goodies.
Offering some physical gifts is a great way to boost the number of people that sign up for your webinar. However, don’t forget about the goodies you can give out digitally.
Consider creating a badge that you can give to people who signup that can be displayed on their site, blog, or socials. You can even have the badge link directly to your signup or landing page for your webinar, helping to bring in even more attendees.
Another way to get people fighting over a spot in your exclusive online event is by running a promotional ticket giveaway for events that cost money. Even the slightest whisper of free stuff will help attract more attention to your event while also allowing someone to attend for free.
There are many different approaches you can take here. You could treat it like a raffle, saying that you’ll draw a few names at random out of the pool of people that signed up in the first week of registration.
Or, you can make it a contest of sorts that helps to boost brand engagement. For example, you can ask attendees to share their favorite story that relates to your product or service. When you select a winner, as a bonus, you’ve got a sweet little additional piece of content to share with your wider audience.
We don’t have to tell you just how powerful social media can be from a marketing standpoint. For example, when you’re putting on a webinar, there are already audiences ready and waiting to hear about your event– those of your brand, speakers, sponsors, and partners.
It’s a good idea to create a media kit that can be shared with your partners, speakers, and sponsors. This way, you can use a fairly uniform promotional style across the web. Don’t forget to share a tracking link, though, so you can know which marketing channels were the most effective.
Is this not your first rodeo? Have you held webinars in the past? If so, you can draw upon the wealth of information you gained from your previous events– including the contact information of past attendees.
When you’re trying to improve webinar signup and attendance, you’d be downright silly not to tap into this resource. When you’re building your email marketing campaign, consider segmenting your email list so that you can send a specific and targeted message to people who have been to your past webinars.
Word of mouth is one of the most effective types of marketing, but also the hardest to come by. You can’t really fake word of mouth– it requires that customers have been genuinely happy enough with your brand that they will go out of their way to recommend it to others.
That being said, encouraging word-of-mouth marketing is a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to social media. For example, by including social sharing buttons, you can make it as easy as clicking a button for people to let others know about your webinar and brand as a whole.
By far, one of the best ways to promote a webinar to your target audience is to build an engaged community around the event. There are so many different platforms you can use for this purpose– LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit, to name a few. Depending on your target demographic and topic, one of these sites is likely more appropriate than the others.
If you already have an online community built around your brand, you can use this existing resource to promote your webinar. You can also create a community specifically around the event, though. If you are planning on offering webinars as a part of a series, consider making a community where you can promote future events, reflect on past events, and let the community create relevant content that drives engagement.
Depending on your brand, goals, and budget, you might consider hiring a brand ambassador to help improve webinar signups and attendance. Of course, you’ll want to find someone who would appeal to your target demographic and fit your brand personality.
If you find the right ambassador with influence over your target audience, you can have them create content about your event as the date approaches. You’ll likely find this is an incredibly effective way of broadening your audience and driving up event signups.
Is your remote team getting a little stressed out as your big webinar gets closer? If so, check out these 20 tips to help de-stress and relax your distributed team.
Once your webinar is over, it’s easy to just move on to the next thing. However, if you go this route, you’re abandoning a giant wealth of information that’s right at your fingertips.
In the weeks that follow your event, poll your attendees. You can find out what they enjoyed, what they could’ve done without, and ultimately what lessons they learned from the webinar. Give them the chance to offer feedback, too– this can be super useful for creating the best possible webinars in the future!
When you put in all the hard work to create an educational and informative webinar, you want to make sure that as many people as possible get to benefit from your brilliance. Though you will likely know which types of strategies are best for your particular brand and event, there’s nothing wrong with trying something new and getting creative in your marketing. You never know; thinking outside the box might just be what allows you to have your most successful webinar to date.
Are you feeling like organizing your webinar is going to require a lot of late-night meetings with your team? Are you just feeling kind of hungry? If so, let us organize a pizza party for your hard-working, distributed team.
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